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Cover image of Mary Shelley in Her Times
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Mary Shelley in Her Times

edited by Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran

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Author of six novels, five volumes of biographical lives, two travel books, and numerous short stories, essays, and reviews, Mary Shelley is largely remembered as the author of Frankenstein, as the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and as the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. This collection of essays, edited by Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran, offers a more complete and complex picture of Mary Shelley, emphasizing the full range and significance of her writings in terms of her own era and ours. Mary Shelley in Her Times brings fresh insight to the life and work of an often...

Author of six novels, five volumes of biographical lives, two travel books, and numerous short stories, essays, and reviews, Mary Shelley is largely remembered as the author of Frankenstein, as the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and as the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. This collection of essays, edited by Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran, offers a more complete and complex picture of Mary Shelley, emphasizing the full range and significance of her writings in terms of her own era and ours. Mary Shelley in Her Times brings fresh insight to the life and work of an often neglected or misunderstood writer who, the editors remind us, spent nearly three decades at the center of England's literary world during the country's profound transition between the Romantic and Victorian eras.

The essays in this volume demonstrate the importance of Mary Shelley's neglected novels, including Matilda, Valperga, The Last Man, and Falkner. Other topics include Mary Shelley's work in various literary genres, her editing of her husband's poetry and prose, her politics, and her trajectory as a female writer. This volume advances Mary Shelley studies to a new level of discourse and raises important issues for English Romanticism and women's studies.

Reviews

Reviews

This is a book to be commended not only for the range of topics it offers, but for the way in which it represents a wide range of styles and approaches.

Mary Shelley in Her Times contains some of the strongest essays of recent times on Shelley's work... A valuable piece of criticism.

Refreshing, alternative readings to the until now predominantly psychobiographical approach... The essays by William St Clair and the late Mitzi Myers are particular highlights in this solid collection.

What is best and most compelling about Mary Shelley in Her Times is the freshness of the perspectives articulated in the essays, the breadth of the material considered, the clarity and energy of the writing itself, and the overall impressiveness of the underlying scholarship. The quality of the work assembled here speaks very well indeed for the future of Romantics scholarship.

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Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
328
ISBN
9780801877339
Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Chapter 1. "Not This Time, Victor!": Mary Shelley's Reversioning of Elizabeth, From Frankenstein to Falkner
Chapter 2. "To Speak In Sanchean Phrase": Cervantes

Preface and Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Chapter 1. "Not This Time, Victor!": Mary Shelley's Reversioning of Elizabeth, From Frankenstein to Falkner
Chapter 2. "To Speak In Sanchean Phrase": Cervantes And The Politics of Mary Shelley's History Of A Six Weeks' Tour
Chapter 3. The Impact of Frankenstein
Chapter 4. From The Fields Of Fancy to Matilda: Mary Shelley's Changing Conception of Her Novella
Chapter 5. Mathilda as Dramatic Actress
Chapter 6. Between Romance and History: Possibility and Contingency in Godwin, Leibniz, and Mary Shelley's Valperga
Chapter 7. Future Uncertain: The Republican Tradition and Its Destiny in Valperga
Chapter 8. Reading the End of the World: The Last Man, History, and the Agency of Romantic Authorship
Chapter 9. Kindertotenlieder: Mary Shelley and the Art of Losing
Chapter 10. Politicizing the Personal: Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and the Coterie Novel
Chapter 11. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley: The Female Author Between Public And Private Spheres
Chapter 12. Poetry as Souvenir: Mary Shelley In The Annuals
Chapter 13. "Trying To Make It As Good As I Can": Mary Shelley's Editing of P. B. Shelley's Poetry and Prose
Chapter 14. Mary Shelley's Lives and Reengendering of History
Chapter 15. Blood Sisters: Mary Shelley, Liz Lochhead, and the Monster
Notes
Contributors
Index

Author Bios
Featured Contributor

Betty T. Bennett

Betty T. Bennett is dean of arts and sciences and professor of literature at the American University, Washington, D.C.