Shelley's Work Research Articles

МІКРОПОЕТИКА ВІДТВОРЕНОГО: РОЗГАДКА ТЕКСТУ «ФРАНКЕНШТЕЙН, АБО СУЧАСНИЙ ПРОМЕТЕЙ» МЕРІ ШЕЛЛІ

Background. The article focuses on the study of microelements that affect the artistic structure of the work and its understanding. The key problem is determining the role and importance of these microelements in creating a general artistic impression of the text. In the course of the research, we sought to determine how micropoetic details of reproduction influence the perception of the plot and symbolism in Mary Shelley's novel, revealing their essence in the context of the author's literary skill. The work was aimed at revealing the importance of micropoetics for the study and interpretation of «Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus» and determining its influence on the artistic integrity of the work.
 The purpose. The purpose of this investigation is to consider and analyze micropoetic elements in the text of the novel «Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus» by Mary Shelley. An attempt was made to reveal what specific small details affect the artistic structure of the work and how they are perceived by the reader. The main goal was to reveal the role of micropoetic means in the creation of a literary work, to understand their influence and meaning for the reader.
 Methods. Literary analysis, cultural context and psychoanalytic analysis were used to solve the tasks. These approaches and research methods allowed us to reveal the interrelationships of micropoetic elements in the work as a whole and to more deeply understand its semantic nuances.
 Results. The successful disclosure of microelements made it possible to determine their importance in creating an artistic structure and influence on the overall narrative of the novel. It was discovered how specific details of the play affect the unfolding of themes and symbolism in Frankenstein. The study revealed how micropoetics influences the creation of Mary Shelley's unique artistic world in this novel. It is determined how these details affect the perception and interpretation of the work by readers, giving them the opportunity to dive deeper into the text. The results indicate the relevance of the study of micropoetics in literary studies and the importance of its study for the understanding and analysis of literary texts. The obtained results are designed to expand our understanding of the role of micropoetics in the work of Mary Shelley and its contribution to the creation of literary masterpieces.
 Discussion. Research has confirmed the importance of small elements in creating the overall impression of Mary Shelley's work. The micro-poetic aspects of the rendering revealed the themes and symbolism more deeply, contributing to a more complete understanding of the text. It was revealed how micropoetic means in creating the world of the work contribute to the formation of a unique author's world in the novel. It was emphasized that micropoetics affects the perception of the work by readers, giving them the opportunity to immerse themselves more deeply in the artistic text.
 The study of micropoetics can be extended to other works by Mary Shelley and other authors for comparative analysis.

Negotiating Transgression, Deathlessness, and Senescence in Mary Shelley's ‘The Mortal Immortal’

This article attempts to study deathlessness in relation to notions of physical and moral transgression. Through a close textual analysis of Mary Shelley's work, ‘The Mortal Immortal’, the article undertakes an enquiry into the discomforts of arrested immortality. It argues that by turning an otherwise normative body corporeally interstitial, deathlessness prompts a narrative of transgression. The focus is on the protagonist, Winzy, and the impact deathlessness has on both his personal and social relations. I utilise theories of transgression, linking them to concepts of physical impurity and corruption to examine how deathlessness dehumanises the individual, rendering them a potential threat to social stability. Keeping corporeal transgression as its focal point, I also elucidate how deathlessness-generated-corporeal interstitiality can problematise sexuality. Deathlessness, therefore, is analysed in terms of multiple transgressions synthesised into one. The article identifies and highlights the factors shaping the theme of transgression and the manner in which transgression plays out within the larger context of deathlessness. In the concluding segments, the paper also explores the manner in which transgression prompts the dehumanisation of the deathless.

Reimagining Frankenstein

Abstract Frankenstein's existential dilemmas of humanity and science have led the novel to be upheld as a premonition of the dangers of overreaching technological advancements, a theme that seems more relevant than ever in the current age. Out of the “creative progeny” of Mary Shelley's work, Ahmed Saadawi and Jeanette Winterson's invocations of Frankenstein stand out as they reimagine the text through distinctive political turning points, questioning how horrors of the past can be reworked to fit new terrors. Their respective works, Frankenstein in Baghdad and Frankissstein, contemplate the future of the human body as altered by technology whether incited by warfare or by the introduction of artificial intelligence. Although different in terms of geographical setting and genre, both texts are connected in their reinvestigation of Frankenstein's core concerns of otherness as related to gender and race, responsibility, as well as the future of humanity and literature. Within their works, the relationships of creator and creation, as well as the individual and society, transcend the supernatural elements, revealing a core anxiety about the future of humanity.

Tropicalizing Frankenstein in Latin America. A tale about promising technologies and apocalyptic robots

Frankenstein is not an exclusive character belonging to the realm of the Gothic narrative, but a vivid element that has evolved and adapted to diverse social contexts and geographies. Mary Shelley's work has endured the passing of time and now is a symbol of the popular culture. In this paper, I look to understand Mary Shelley's Frankenstein influence on people’s attitudes regarding technology and science, particularly artificial intelligence and robots. How the negative visions and fears about the misuse of science to break traditional moral and religious boundaries are still present in popular culture. Fieldwork will be focused on reviewing several Latin American newspapers and magazine articles in Spanish and Portuguese published on the Internet. As final outcomes will show, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein still continues influencing people’s imagination about science and technology, even in technically less developed regions.

Лінгвостилістичні засоби вираження емотивності у творі жанру жахів М. Шеллі „Франкенштейн, або Сучасний Прометей”

In the article the author notes that students of philological faculties often choose the horror genre and M. Shelley's work „Frankenstein, or Modern Prometheus” in the classical literature. This proves the need for a thorough study of the linguostylistic means of expression of emotionality in the mentioned above work. An inherent feature of the text under study is to excite, influence, compel to experience its content and bring pleasure. Having analyzed the reproduction of the emotional field of this genre, which has a special genre-forming potential, we can say that the negative emotions, that prevail in the text Frankenstein, are agony, rage, anger and hatred. These emotions are interconnected and therefore are realized together. A characteristic feature of the emotional component of the horror genre is the depiction of emotions on the background of physiological processes, which allows to depict the experience of the character through the internal changes in his/her body and the symptoms of these changes. In this work of horror literature, the emotions of sketching with somatisms blood and heart are the most clearly conveyd. The emotions in the horror genre are verbalized by the nomination of the emotion and its contextual description. Linguistic stylistic means of expression of emotionality and framing the genre features of Frankenstein's horror work are dominated by epithets, comparisons and metaphors. The language implementation of the concept of horror in the work of M. Shelley has 78 tokens of fear and their derivatives in the original. For example, in the cognition the token of fear is combined with the main genre-forming tokens as follows: token corpse – 10 times, coffin – 7, tomb – 3, grave – 10. It is determined that the work is saturated with nominations of emotions agony, anguish, indignation, sorrow, wretchedness and rage, which are adequately reproduced by the reception of a selection of stylistic correspondences.

Signs of Change: Percy Shelley's Language of Mutability as Precursor to Darwin's Theory of Evolution

AbstractThis essay argues that the poetry of Percy Shelley may have contributed to Charles Darwin's ability to conceptualize forces of change in the natural world. The work of Shelley occupies a key position in the development of pre‐Darwinian thought about change and transformation. His early interest in Lockean empiricism and his knowledge of the natural sciences have long been recognized by scholars working on romanticism and science. Less explored are the ways in which the poetry of Shelley has a bearing on the intellectual challenge Darwin faced in interpreting signs of change in the natural world. Shelley's poetry offers an account of how such change reveals itself: an account based not on a priori concepts of divine language, but on material evidence of the power of natural phenomena to convey information. In this way, poetry and science come into relation with each other.Like most young men of his time, Darwin would have been aware of Shelley's controversial reputation. What survives of the correspondence between the young Darwin and his friend the aspiring poet Henry Matthew, who was his contemporary at Cambridge, indicates that the two men had intense debates about Shelley's work, and about his notoriety as a materialist and atheist. Though no details are given, the correspondence does indicate that both of them read the poet's work and had conversations about it.Shelley's use of an evolving poetic/mythological vocabulary, putting pressure on the conventional meanings of words (a kind of linguistic change) to enable the reader to conceive of global processes of change, strongly advanced Romantic‐era thinking in this regard. Shelley's enthusiasm for the materialist philosophy of Lucretius provided him with good authority for the belief that the natural world was inhabited by forces that would powerfully impinge upon the minds of humans. His mature poetics remained open to the idea that observing the operations of these natural forces, traceable in the geological record, would reveal signs of terrestrial change and prepare the awakened mind for a future transformed world. Darwin (for all his well‐known anxiety about challenging Christian beliefs) would have had in Shelley's poetry a productive model for conceptualizing the processes of nature, combining in such works as “Mont Blanc” and Prometheus Unbound changes in the referentiality of linguistic signs with observed changes in the forms of nature.

The Neglected Shelley

Proofs of The Neglected Shelley Table of Contents: An Uncelebrated Facility: The Achievement of Shelley’s Letters Timothy Webb 2 Symmetrical Forms and Infuriate Paroxysms: Observing the Body in Percy Shelley’s Gothic Fiction 35 Diego Saglia 3 H arps, Heroes and Yelling Vampires: The 1810 Poetry Collections David Duff 4 The Notes to Queen Mab and Shelley’s Spinozism Timothy Morton 5 ‘His left hand held the lyre’: Shelley’s Narrative Fiction Fragments Stephen C. Behrendt 6 Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Text(s) in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein Charles E. Robinson 7. Shelley's Second Kingdom Rosalind and Helen and 'Mazenghi Jack Donavan 8. Shelley's Work in Progress: 'Athanase: A Fragment' and the unfinished draft of 'Prince Athanase'. Alan Weinberg 9. Satyr Play in a Radical Vein: Shelley's 'Cyclops' Maria Schoina 10. The Sensitive-Plant and the Poetry of Irresponsibility Richard Cronin 11 ‘Infinitely comical’: Italianizing the ‘Hymn to Mercury’ Timothy Webb

The Work of the Negative: Symbolic, Gothic, and Romantic in Shelley and Hegel

I IN A DEFENCE OF POETRY (1821), AMIDST SEVERAL CONVENTIONALLY ROMANTIC figurations of it, (1) Shelley also describes poetry as a secret alchemy that turns to potable gold poisonous waters that flow from death through life (533). The phrase marks persistence in Shelley's work of what Jerrold Hogle calls a sensibility, and points back to his second Gothic novel St. Irvyne (1811), (2) whose plot has as its absent cause alchemist Ginotti. In that novel Ginotti sees a ... borne on sweet strain of music. Like famous Brocken-spectre that so fascinated Romantics, (3) this phantasm suddenly changes into a gigantic and deformed shape (St. Irvyne, 237), anticipating Shelley's last poem, The Triumph of Life (1822). For Hogle, discussing earlier work, Shelley struggles against this 'Gothic' psyche with its oscillation between light and darkness, seeking to transform death into life, and managing to put an 'intelligent' Soul in place of vacancy through a kind of deism. (4) In this paper I will suggest a more profoundly generative relationship between Romantic and Gothic, while thinking Gothic more broadly in terms of what Shelley's contemporary Hegel calls Symbolic. For Hegel uses term in a sense almost opposite to way it is understood by Goethe and Coleridge, so as to signify an art that is premature and malformed rather than one that embodies general in particular. (5) Unusually for a period in which aesthetic was associated with beautiful, Hegel also makes a place for this art that fails to adequate[ly] embody the Idea, which can only be signified through symbols that set reader task of deciphering them without actually attaining to decipherment. (6) As a form that is adolescent and manic, Hegelian Symbolic aptly describes one side of disconnection of modes in St. Irvyne. The novel has two plots whose disjunction, lest we fail to notice it, is also marked by omission of two chapters. In main plot ostensible hero is Wolftein, though its prime mover is Ginotti, obscure symbolic figure who sanctions Wolftein's poisoning of bandit Cavigni in order to obtain lovely Megalena de Metastasio. The names are themselves significant, in this novel that egregiously confuses foreign nationalities: Ginotti suggests an Italian cunning, whereas Wolfstein's name is rough and Germanic. In main plot Ginotti functions as Mephistophelean shadow and Dark Interpreter of increasingly dissolute Wolfstein, until plot disposes of both of them in its Faustian conclusion. But novel is also sporadically intersected by a Radcliffean subplot, focused on more elegantly named Eloise, who turns out to be Wolfstein's sister, even though she is French while he is Bohemian. Eloise is seduced by casuistical Nempere, rescued by another libertine, and finally ends up marrying Fitzeustace, a Peacockian parody of typical Shelleyan Poet. This Romantic subplot fantastically escapes Gothic sensibility of main plot by which it is enveloped. For Nempere turns out to be Ginotti, which means that Nempere, though killed off in subplot, is still alive in main plot, thus casting doubt on whether his metamorphic alias Ginotti is indeed dead. But do we want to dispose of Ginotti and work of negative figured by Gothic? And do reductive conventions of Gothic, in turn, foreclose upon a certain Symbolic excess in novel? Or does novel's titular echo of Godwin's St. Leon (1799), where alchemy is also a figure for schemes of sociopolitical improvement, make Ginotti a shorthand figure for some future and as yet undigested transformation of the poisonous waters that flow from death through life (DP, 533)? Indeed before its unsatisfying conclusion, Ginotti had opened up Symbolic potential of Gothic by promising Wolfstein elixir of life. …

The Gift and the Return: Deconstructing Mary Shelley'sLodore

This paper begins with Barbara Johnson's examination of the erasure of sexual difference within the Yale school, and in particular her comments upon the work of Mary Shelley. Taking up hints in her statements about the relation between Mary Shelley's work and deconstruction, I suggest a reading of Mary Shelley's penultimate novel, Lodore, in relation to Derrida's Given Time. Lodore, which traditionally appeared a rather conservative novel to Mary Shelley's critics, has a number of parallels in its plot to the logic of the gift as set out in Derrida's text. It also, however, allows us to begin to think through the related concept of the return, so crucial to both of the Shelley's thinking and writing. The essay analyses Lodore in relation to Derrida's account of the impossibility of the gift, in order, eventually, to move towards some comments about sexual difference, the novel, the gift and the return.

Shelley and Vitality by Sharon Ruston

MLR, I02.2, 2007 489 theirauthors were friends,or at leastpart of the circlewhich revolved aroundWilliam Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft inLondon in themid- I7gos. Each novel was re ceived as a roman-a-clef, Amelia Alderson describing Godwin andWollstonecraft's idealistic attempts to forge a relationship based on rationality,not convention, and Mary Hays fictionalizing the story of her unrequited love for William Frend, another member of their radical clique. However, afterher friend Wollstonecraft died, Amelia Alderson drifted away from this coterie,marrying thepainter JohnOpie and only thenbeginning towrite fiction. Her second novel, Adeline Mowbray, has usually been regarded as an anti-Jacobin work, critical of the radicals' idealism and offering a bleak assessment ofwhat hap pens when their theory isput intopractice. Read in thisway, her novel offersa strong contrast with the unabashed social radicalism ofMemoirs of Emma Courtney, the storyof an independent woman boldly following her own intellectual and sexual de sires.But asMiriam Wallace explains inher admirably concise introduction,Adeline Mowbray can also be read as a social critique, particularly of the long-established or thodoxies constraining women's lives.After all, thenovel can seem as unenthusiastic about marriage and a life lived according to the dictates of female propriety as it is about Wollstonecraftian experimentation. As a result, some recent critics-though not all-have detected hints of subversion, and ironieswhich belie the tale's osten sibly conservative moral. Wallace herself takes a balanced view, but admits thatpart of her purpose inpresenting Adeline Mowbray togetherwith Hays's more manifestly radical text is todemonstrate the fragilityof the radical/conservative dichotomy. It is thepolitical ambiguities of these novels thatmake them so fascinating to teach, but they are not an easy read for today's undergraduates. The novels were deliber ately written as part of a debate, and to appreciate their complexities, a significant knowledge of their context is necessary. To supplement the introduction,Wallace has provided fifteen text boxes, interpolated into the texts, each addressing a con textual theme ('Female Sexuality and Desire' or 'Abolition Literature'). These are nicely succinct but stillmanage to be well informed and thought-provoking; they add significant value to the edition, as do the contemporary reviews and the hand ful of illustrations. A two-for-one edition like thismight seem somewhat coercive, depriving lecturers of the chance to choose their own set texts (a strong argument could be made for teaching Emma Courtney with Elizabeth Hamilton's Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, for example, which directly parodies it:both are newly pub lished byBroadview Press). But the extras probably compensate. It is regrettable that the subtitle ofAdeline Mowbray is given incorrectly (TheMother and Daughter, not The Mother and theDaughter), and it is a pity that this edition is available only in theUnited States, but this is still awelcome resource foranyone teaching a course on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women's writing. NEWCASTLEUNIVERSITY MATTHEW GRENBY Shelley and Vitality. By SHARONRuSTON. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2005. Xiii+299pp. ?45. ISBN 978-I-4039-i824-6. Sharon Ruston's account of Shelley's engagement with theburgeoning contemporary debate about the nature of lifecontributes valuably both to the ongoing recovery of the historical registers of Shelley's work and to our understanding of theGordian relationship between science and literature in the 'Romantic' period. Simultaneously unearthing a controversy long neglected by literaryhistorians and adding new detail toShelley's biography, Ruston establishes beyond doubt that thevitality debate pro vided Shelley with a powerful vocabulary forexpressing his ideas about imaginative and political processes, and the relationship between them. 490 Reviews Ruston's firstchapter describes the origins of the vitality debate in eighteenth century natural philosophy, summarizing contributions by, among others, Priestley, Thelwall, Darwin, and Adam Walker, Shelley's scientificmentor at Syon House and Eton. These useful summaries build towards amore focused discussion of the increasingly vitriolic controversy between the twoBart's surgeons, JohnAbernethy andWilliam Lawrence, in I8I4-20. Abernethy, professedly adapting theunpublished work of JohnHunter, argued that life resulted from an unknown principle, super added to the physical matter of living bodies; against this, thematerialist Lawrence, Abernethy's erstwhile protege at Bart's, argued that lifewas simply an effectof the particular organization ofmatter in livingbodies. What emerges clearly fromRuston's account here is...

Mary Shelley's Bestiary: The Last Man and the Discourse of Species

Abstract This essay won the 2005 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Romanticism Section. Mary Shelley's 1826 novel The Last Man richly rewards inquiry through the discourse of species, for it poses the question, “Is the human that which is not the animal?” By subjecting an entire species to the plague, Shelley reveals the extent to which human being is defined over and against the irreducible animal other. In so doing, her text exposes the predation that lies at the root of Western humanism. Considering how Shelley tests the limits of the human, this essay pursues such issues as her handling of the plague itself (for contrary to historical record, the illness in this novel preys only on people) and her critique of the civilizing process that the eponymous narrator undergoes (a process that seems to require the killing of animals and the killing of people as if they are animals). In addition, it traces the decentering of man as the raison d’être of nature and the taxonomic crisis that ensues when Lionel Verney is indeed the sole remnant of humankind. In the twenty‐first century, when the uncontrollable holds the foreground of our own imaginations, Shelley's deployment of the plague – that literalization of all that is incommensurable – speaks to us with renewed force, and the discourse of species offers a particularly useful lens through which to view Shelley's destabilizing of foundational binaries. Drawing on the work of Cary Wolfe, Maureen McLane, Jacques Derrida, and others, this paper argues that Shelley's work offers a radical interrogation of subjectivity itself. Examining the relationship between human and non‐human animals in The Last Man reveals that the novel is more than a critique of imperialism or Romanticism; rather, it is a profound inquiry into the insufficiency of categories, the ephemeral nature of form, and the sacrificial economy that subtends our culture.

Shelley among Others: The Play of the Intertext and the Idea of Language by Stuart Peterfreund (review)

MLR, 99.3,2004 755 pression (in the material field) or the despair of that minority of writers (most notably Byron) who were disenchanted by the 'crowning carnage'. Brief review necessitates simplistic summary. It is unfair to the flexibilityof Shaw's nuanced and highly theorized account. The text readily leaps to overarching generalities to redefine Romanticism, drawing (often uncritically) upon authorities such as Lacan (not an obvious figure to quote on Waterloo) or Christensen. Some of the leaps are demanding. Thus Coleridge's Zapolya is claimed to reveal, as 'the meaning of Waterloo', 'the renunciation of endless erotic play in the resumption of symbolic castration' (p. 137) and Wordsworth's guilty confession of pleasure in the narration of battle is argued to show how, 'in the symbolic order [. . .] the poet's participation in a culture of sacrifice [. . .] finds a perverse form of reassurance, to invoke Rene Girard's analysis, in rehearsing the spectacle of its own dissolution' (pp. 140-41). This kind of writing functions at a high level of abstraction which, forthe 'pedestrian muse' of this reviewer, sometimes recalls Byron's comment on Coleridge (in the Dedication of Don Juan): 'I wish he would explain his explanation.' What exactly is meant, for instance, by the words 'real' and 'other' (with or without capitalization) in a statement such as 'With Coleridge there remains [. . .] the pathos of having failed to reach the place ofthe Real in the Other' (p. 130)? In contradistinctionone might claim that had Coleridge got to the 'real' he would have outsoared not only Plato but St Paul! Cardiff University Malcolm Kelsall Shelley among Others: The Play of theIntertext and theIdea ofLanguage. By Stuart Peterfreund. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2002. xiii + 4o6pp. ?38.50. ISBN 0-8018-6751-7. Stuart Peterfreund's aim is ambitious and laudable in a critical climate which is still redolent of fragmentariness and almost compulsory patchiness: 'to produce a com? prehensive study of Shelley's poetry, including most ofthe major poems and many of the so-called minor poems as well' (p. ix). This endeavour situates Peterfreund's book among those studies which attempt to draw together the idealistic and the politically grounded dimensions of Shelley's work, to make 'Shelley whole' so to speak, but it also acknowledges the heteroglossic nature of Shelley's thought and work. Broadly, Peterfreund attempts to discuss 'the intertextual and linguistic conceptions and prac? tices that Shelley himself deployed in seeking and claiming forhimself a place in the Western literary tradition' (p. ix). Peterfreund emphasizes the importance of philo? sophy, psychoanalytic criticism, and theories of language forhis own analysis and for Shelley' s understanding of the role of poetry in society. More specifically, Peterfreund examines what he understands 'Shelley's idea of language and its play to be, and how [he understands] this idea to inform the formal and thematic elements, as well as the social focus, of his poetry in general and of several of his major poems in particular' (p. 2). For Peterfreund, Shelley's play of language, throughout his ceuvre, centres primarily on the continuous tension between metaphor and metonymy: 'It is the drama of moving beyond historical contingency if not beyond temporality outright, the drama of fostering the reign of metaphor and forestalling the reign of metonymy, of fostering heteroglossia and forestalling the advent of a common language, that is the basis for the [sie] both the artistic and the social engagement of Shelley's poetry' (p. 24). So far so good. This focus on the tension between metaphor and metonymy, however useful as a starting point, is unfortunately reduced to a rather rigid instrument of evaluation, and, as a result, the texts under scrutiny suffer from readings which do not reflect the ongoing exploratory and probing struggle for elucidation so often at the heart 756 Reviews of Shelley's poetry. In some ways I read Shelley as a poet of obstinate questionings, who has, in Michael O'Neill's words, 'a dislike of reaching conclusions' (Romanti? cism and the Self-Conscious Poem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 131). Peterfreund 's interpretations, however, are geared towards conclusions which are coloured by the predominance of either metaphor or metonymy: 'Metaphor...

"The Child of a Fierce Hour": Shelley and Napoleon Bonaparte

IN SHELLEY: THE PURSUIT, RICHARD HOLMES DISCUSSES A DIFFICULT August 1815 letter from Percy Shelley to his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg. (1) Holmes finds this letter because Shelley's remarks on the final denouement of the Napoleonic struggle in Europe appear to him to be distanced to the point of indifference (290). Shelley's letter refers to newspaper reports describing the continuance of Allied enormities in post-Restoration France, and then goes on to say that: In considering the events of the day I endeavour to divest my mind of temporary sensations, to consider them as already historical. This is difficult. Spite of ourselves the human beings which surround us infect us with their opinions; so much as to forbid us to be observers of the questions arising out of the events of the age. (2) Holmes's seminal challenge to the Arnoldian and New Critical view of Shelley evidently influences his reading of this passage. Even so, it is not immediately obvious why it should be difficult to believe that these were the words of a radical aged 23 (290). Rather, Shelley's concern to remain a dispassionate observer of political events, and attendant anxiety about intellectually infectious public opinion, is entirely consistent with the Godwinian mainstream of his thought. (3) What really is extraordinary about this letter, however, is the fact that it marks one of only two ad hominem engagements with in Shelley's extant correspondence, the other being a December 1812 letter to Hogg (Letters 1: 345-54; Holmes 292). This is not, of course, to suggest that does not feature in Shelley's work. Conversely, he clearly plays an important role in The Triumph of Life (1822), and is the subject of three shorter poems: To the Emperors of Russia and Austria ... (1810), Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte (1815), and Lines written on hearing the News of the Death of Napoleon (1821). (4) He also appears in passing in Shelley's Ode to Liberty (1820), and Philosophical View of Reform (1819), and is at least implicitly present in the Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills (1818). However, very little scholarly attention has been paid to Shelley's engagement with and there is, I think, a critical perception that he didn't have a great deal to say on the subject, at least not when compared to contemporaries like Wordsworth, Southey, Hazlitt, and Byron. Tellingly, the only full-length study of Romanticism's relationship with Napoleon--Simon Bainbridge's and English Romanticism (1995)--makes virtually no mention of Shelley. Seeking to redress this lack of critical attention, the present piece identifies an engagement with as a sustained and important feature of Shelley's work. Intensely concerned with understanding the disastrous course of the French Revolution--the master theme of the epoch in which we live--Shelley's thought needed, necessarily, to take account of (Letters 1: 504). In and English Romanticism, Simon Bainbridge traces a broad pattern of disillusionment and concern in Britain as the erstwhile defender of the French Revolution against foreign aggression becomes an Imperial aggressor himself. Napoleon, as Bainbridge demonstrates, provided early nineteenth-century British culture with an obvious and potent focus for libertarian disenchantment, conservative reaction, and cross-party national(ist) anxiety. Writers like Wordsworth and Coleridge, Bainbridge suggests, drawing on now-familiar arguments about Romanticism's relationship with history, sought to define their own poetic role in opposition to Napoleon's increasingly expansionist politics. Conversely, writers on the other side of the divide--Byron and Hazlitt in particular--continued not only to valorize in order to attack the increasingly conservative establishment, but also to point up their own opposition to the literary organs of that establishment by describing themselves in Napoleonic terms. …

Mary Shelley in Her Times

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.

Shelley and His Readers: Beyond Paranoid Politics

In this work, a full-length critical analysis of the dialogue between Shelley's poetry and its contemporary reviewers, Kim Wheatley argues that Shelley's idealism can be recovered through the study of its reception. Incorporating extensive research in major early-19th-century British periodicals, Wheatley integrates a reception-based methodology with careful textual analysis to demonstrate that the contemporary reception of Shelley's work registers the immediate impact of the poet's increasingly idealistic passion for reforming the world. Wheatley examines Shelley's poetry within the context of Romantic-era politics, a heightened language of defenisveness and persecution incorporating Miltonic and apocalyptic imagery that paints adversaries as Satanic rebels against the orthodoxy. A simultaneously empowering and disabling dynamic, the paranoid style embodies a preoccupation with the efficacy of the printed word, thus singling out radical writers such as Shelley for personal attacks. Using Shelley's Queen Mab as an example of his early radical poetry, Wheatley demonstrates that the poet, like his contemporary reviewers, is caught up in the paranoid rhetoric. Failing to challenge the assumptions of paranoid politics - conspiracy and contagion - Shelley takes merely an oppositional stance. However, Shelley's later poems, exemplified by Prometheus Unbound and Adonais, introduce a boldly innovative approach. These less explicitly political poems transcend the dynamics of paranoid politics by incorporating an experimental language that creates an interplay between poem and reader. Shifting to an apolitical conception of the aeshetic, Shelley's poetry is able to move beyond cultural paranoia. The final chapter of this study argues that the posthumous reception of Adonais uniquely replicates the elegiac moves and complex idealism of the poem, concluding with a discussion of how the Shelley circle aestheticized the poet after his death. The book offers a new approach to the question of how to recuperate Romantic idealism in the face of such literary criticism as deconstructionism and historicism. The use of reception-based methodology should make this book valuable not only to specialists of the Romantic period but also to anyone interested in literary criticism.

Werewolves in Psyche and Cinema: Man‐Beast Transformation and Paradox

The phenomenon of human beings undergoing transformations into other species has been prevalent notion since dawn of consciousness. It occurs readily when boundaries between humans and animals are perceived as indistinct or when presence of those boundaries is being tested or established. Such changes may be voluntary-brought about in an effort to obtain certain desirable characteristics possessed by an animal-or they may be involuntary-inflicted wantonly by an outside force upon an innocent person or intentionally upon guilty individual as punishment. Over course of history, this so-called shape-changing has involved many animals, with wolf being one of most frequent and persistent. From Anglo-Saxon wer, meaning man and wulf meaning wolf comes term werewolf, defined as man temporarily or permanently transformed into wolf (Spence 426). Lycanthropy is magical ability to assume form and characteristics of wolf, and is also used to denote mental disorder in which person believes himself to be wolf. Our contemporary technological world is imbued with positivism that leaves little room for humananimal forms like werewolves to prowl night. For industrialized society, belief in actuality of werewolves has all but vanished; yet creatures still exist in human psyche, lying in wait to disturb our dreams. They remain alive and well in twentieth century, according to recent psychiatric case studies (Keck 113; Kulick 134). They survive in popular culture through fantasy fiction, Gothic horror novels, tabloids, and even in 1978 song about werewolves in London. No single classic gave rise to werewolf image in way that Mary Shelley's work established Frankenstein and Bram Stoker's novel created Dracula. Rather contemporary humanwolf has been inspired largely by cinematic representations. The werewolf is subject of films which have recurred quite regularly over six decades and in which idea of becoming werewolf is real possibility, depicted with creativity and enthusiasm, encoding many symbolic meanings. The 1994 Hollywood hit, Wolf, described as the thinking man's werewolf movie (Janusonis D5), stars Jack Nicholson, whose normal feral intensity and lupine features including demonically arched eyebrows are said to fit him for role (Wolf 13; James 13). He plays Will Randall, book editor of New York publishing house who, when story begins, is polite, intelligent individual described as last civilized man. He is known as a good man, but as someone remarks, the worst things happen to best people. His character changes after being bitten by wolf while traveling in wilds of Vermont. Not only does this event occur during full moon, but also on very night moon was closer to earth than it had been in 100 years. The first sign that anything unusual had happened to him is reaction of extreme fear that he inspires in horse. Later, birds fly in panic out of trees when he approaches. Soon, dense hair grows around bite wound on his hand. Then he develops an extraordinarily keen sense of smell, allowing him to detect odor of another man on his wife's clothes, betraying her infidelity. He no longer needs glasses, hears conversations through closed doors, and can move each ear separately. Hair grows on his face. He twitches his nose and sniffs air. His habits change to sleeping by day and being active at night. He makes love to his wife after long abstinence, first pulling off her bathrobe belt with his teeth. She responds by calling him You animal! He feels 20 years younger and suddenly has courage to decide to start his own company. He beats up three thugs who attempt to rob him and leaps over wall when policemen chase him out of zoo where he has gone to feed. He gives up his former vegetarian lifestyle and craves meat-the bloodier better. Randall's conversion is complete when at next full moon he jumps out of window, growls revealing fangs instead of teeth, chases deer through woods and brings it down. …

Shelley's satire: violence, exhortation, and authority

Jones challenges traditional images of Percy Bysshe Shelley in this first book-length analysis of his major satiric works. Bringing to bear genre theory and a New Historical frame of reference, Jones places Shelley's satires in their broad context of popular, political, and material culture. Jones argues that Shelley's satiric poems express an important countervoice within Shelley's work as well as within Romanticism as a whole. These ironic, public, referential, and worldly texts are shown to be deeply ambivalent, employing the imagery of curse, revenge, and punishment in a coercive rhetoric of violence only occasionally covered with laughter. Thus the satires vividly represent the darker side of the Romantic poet's relation to society as well as his efforts to engage and to change the world. Shelley's Satire illuminates the historical and cultural contexts that stirred the poet's imagination - contemporary superstition, the popular entertainments of the pantomime and graphic prints, and historical events such as the Peterloo Massacre and the Queen Caroline affair. It will engage not only Shelleyans and Romanticists but also anyone interested in satire as a genre, New Historicist methods, theories of cultural formation, and the Regency period in English history.

Imageless truths: Shelley's poetic fictions

In Imageless Truths, Karen A. Weisman offers a new reading of Shelley's work in the context of the poet's changing constructions of poetic fictions. Shelley's understanding of language in general, and of the fictions and their rhetorical trope in particular, evolved throughout his career, and Weisman argues that it is in his self-consciousness over these transformations that we can find the primary motivating factor in the poet's philosophical and literary development. Weisman discerns in Shelley an ongoing quest for a mode of fiction-making that can accommodate both the poet's belief in a metaphysical ultimate and his anxiety over the implications of grounding poetic fictions too firmly in the details of everyday life. If Shelley's awareness of fictionality is a major element in the poetry, it is an awareness that comes with the troubled sense of the limits of fiction. Weisman contents that it is this persistent, double-edged anxiety that distinguishes Shelley from the other English Romantics. Her point is not intended to deny the validity or the continuing relevance of the deconstructionist perspective, nor the value of its various claims for Shelley; she is simply concerned that the instability of poetic fictions was eventually perceived as a given by Shelley, as the beginning premise which he acknowledged and then tried to move beyond. Imageless Truths will be of interest to students and scholars of English literature.

The Promethean Politics of Milton, Blake, and Shelley

For more than two millennia, the myth of has fascinated writers and artists. Examining the political core of this myth as presented in the poetic tradition, this book traces Promethean figures and imagery in the major poetry of Milton, Blake and Shelley. Although the significance of the myth in Western literature has often been noted, this study recognizes an ambiguity in Promethean depictions that persists from Greek drama through the English Romantics. While is a benefactor, he also takes the role of sophist and trickster. Drawing primarily on Paradise Lost, this book shows how Milton's use of is significant not only because of his undisputed influence on the Romantics, but also because his Promethean figure reflects the myth in all of its facets, from the traitorous Satan and disobediant Adam to the Son in his salvational role. Blake's responses to Milton and to Dante are closely related to his recasting of the myth in his prophetic works while the book focuses on Shelley's work Prometheus Unbound to examine Shelley's Promethean politics.

Apocapolitics: Allusion and Structure in Shelley's "Mask of Anarchy"

The Mask of Anarchy occupies a curious place in modern criticism of Shelley's poetry. It has been praised as uncharacteristic of Shelley's work by F. R. Leavis,1 admired for its political content by Richard Holmes,2 and ignored by Harold Bloom and by Earl Wasserman in their influential studies.3 There will always of course be disagreement as to worth of a particular poem, but perhaps most striking in this instance are reservations expressed by some of those who have written about The Mask with greatest degree of interest. For Thomas R. Edwards, is a fine poem, in its earlier parts very nearly a great one, but clash of attitudes between what Edwards sees as Shelley's overt political intentions and his lurking despair about politics makes result a demonstration of how a certain kind of poetic imagination can damage its own admirable concern for public world.4 Although Richard Hendrix takes issue with this conclusion, praising The Mask's of dramatic form ... with political insight and populist attitudes, he concedes that the blend was imperfect.5 Michael Scrivener, who has illuminatingly discussed The Mask in relation to popular radical iconography, finds poem contradictory, at war with itself, not entirely resolved; and Stephen C. Behrendt finds in it an ambivalence of voice [that] is potentially dangerous, for poem implicitly condones a variety of violence it explicitly condemns.6 I suggest that these positive but uneasy views are responses to something deeply embedded in structure of The Mask of Anarchy: relationship between apocalypse and millenium.