Author : Jane Blumberg
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)
Book Synopsis Mary Shelley's Early Novels by : Jane Blumberg
Download or read book Mary Shelley's Early Novels written by Jane Blumberg and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.