Mary Shelley's Early Novels: 'this Child of Imagination and Misery'This long-overdue reappraisal of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's work convincingly challenges the commonly held view that she was merely a passive mouthpiece for her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, for her father, William Godwin, and for the radical milieu that surrounded her. Jane Blumberg reexamines Shelley's most challenging and ambitious novels - the best-known, Frankenstein; the historical novel Valperga; and The Last Man, a futuristic novel detailing the destruction of the world's population by plague - in light of her premise that the actual driving force in Shelley's writings was her fundamental intellectual conflict with the men in her life. Blumberg departs from traditional scholarship which has focused on the personal influences in Shelley's fiction - her father's emotional coldness, difficult childbirth and postpartum depressions, the difficulties of being a woman writer, for example - to show how these novels reflect both Shelley's assertion of her intellectual and ideological independence and her gradual rejection of Percy Shelley's radical tenets. Blumberg also gives due attention to Shelley's competent work as editor and in-house critic of Byron and Percy Shelley and provides a revisionist account of her role as her husband's literary executor, giving her credit for her meticulous care in developing printed texts from the poems she edited directly from manuscripts. |
Contents
A History of the Jews | 10 |
Frankenstein and the Good Cause | 30 |
4 | 57 |
Copyright | |
9 other sections not shown
Other editions - View all
Mary Shelley’s Early Novels: ‘This Child of Imagination and Misery’ Jane Blumberg Limited preview - 2016 |
Mary Shelley’s Early Novels: ‘This Child of Imagination and Misery’ Jane Blumberg No preview available - 2014 |
Common terms and phrases
Adrian ambition Beatrice Beatrice's beauty believed biography Caleb Williams Canto Castruccio Cenci character Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Christianity Claire creation critics destruction Don Juan early earth edition emotional England essay Euthanasia evil expressed fair copy father fear feelings fiction Frankenstein friends Geddes Godwin Godwinian Greek heart History human husband Ibid idea ideal imagination inspired intellectual Italy Jewish Jews John Murray John Murray Publishers journal Last later letter Lionel literary Lodore London Lord Byron Mary Shelley Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Mazeppa mind Monster moral nature never offered original Oxford University Press Paine passion Paterin PBS's death Percy Bysshe Shelley Perkin Warbeck plague poet poet's Poetical poetry pointed Political Justice Posthumous Poems Prometheus Unbound prose published Queen Mab radical Raymond readers rejection relationship religion Revolution role Romantic seems spirit stanza story suggests Sunstein theme Trelawny Valperga Verney Victor Windsor women writing wrote