Mary Shelley in Her Times

Betty T. Bennett, Stuart Curran

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9780801874628
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1 : “Not this time, Victor!”: Mary Shelley’s Reversioning of Elizabeth, from Frankenstein to Falkner
• 2 : “To speak in Sanchean phrase”: Cervantes and the Politics of Mary Shelley’s History of a Six Weeks’ Tour
• 3 : The Impact of Frankenstein
• 4 : From The Fields of Fancy to Matilda: Mary Shelley’s Changing Conception of Her Novella
• 5 : Mathilda as Dramatic Actress
• 6 : Between Romance and History: Possibility and Contingency in Godwin, Leibniz, and Mary Shelley’s Valperga
• 7 : Future Uncertain: The Republican Tradition and Its Destiny in Valperga
• 8 : Reading the End of the World: The Last Man, History, and the Agency of Romantic Authorship
• 9 : Kindertotenlieder: Mary Shelley and the Art of Losing
• 10 : Politicizing the Personal: Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and the Coterie Novel
• 11 : Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley: The Female Author between Public and Private Spheres
• 12 : Poetry as Souvenir: Mary Shelley in the Annuals
• 13 : “Trying to make it as good as I can”: Mary Shelley’s Editing of P. B. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose
• 14 : Mary Shelley’s Lives and the Reengendering of History
• 15 : Blood Sisters: Mary Shelley, Liz Lochhead, and the Monster
• Notes
• Contributors
• Index