Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

This article adopts a historical and biographical perspective in order to investigate Percy Bysshe Shelley’s experience of Milan in April 1818. To this end, I trace the Shelleys’ arrival in the city and focus on the places they visited, their contacts, and the encounters they made so as to re- construct the poet’s “Milanese circle”. Subsequently, I focus on “Ode to Naples” and Hellas and argue that Shelley’s references to the medieval and early modern history of the city should be seen as transhistorical allusions to the political contingency of the Lombardo-Venetian capital after the Hapsburg restoration.

In the novels, Never Let Me Go, and Frankenstein the authors utilize the concepts developed in Marxist theories to make readers aware of the systematic oppression to the working-class. The idea of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat comes from The Communist Manifesto as the bourgeoisie is the owners of the means of production, while the proletariat represents the working-class (Marx). In Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro utilizes the clones as a symbolic representation of the limitations on the working-class in society. While the plot and characters differ widely from Frankenstein the overall message regarding social inequality is similar. However, one crucial distinction is the results of the oppressed characters when realizing their limitations in social mobility. For Kathy and Tommy, their reaction was to continue along the path of donation and completion. Ishiguro attempts to critique that society is complacent in allowing for social inequality to persevere and strengthen the disparities in wealth between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley utilizes the relationship between the monster and Victor Frankenstein to demonstrate the separation between the working-class and the bourgeoisie. By having the monster react with physical violence after his rejection from human society, Shelley is claiming the necessity of a working-class revolt if required for social mobility.

There are strong echoes of the form and structure of slave narrative in the creature’s telling of his own story in Frankenstein. This is not surprising given Shelley’s background and interests, and in the topicality of the issue of abolition and emancipation in the early nineteenth century. Shelley frames her telling of the narrative using a classically republican framework that emphasises the contrast between master and slave and their interdependence, as well as the essential role played by virtue and equality. While this framework was common in abolitionist debates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Shelley’s own approach resembles and seems to draw heavily on the particular form developed by her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, in its understanding of the corrupting effect of domination on social virtue and in the creation of deeply entrenched cultural prejudices.

Shelley does not merely rehearse standard principles, however, but works innovatively within them to produce a prescient analysis of the dynamic between dominator, victim and the society that permits and creates them both. I show how her account foreshadows in a number of respects, Frederick Douglass’s own analysis of the condition of ex-slaves in supposedly free society, and of the life and death struggle that emerges not just between masters and slaves but engulfing the whole of their society. The initial domination of slaves gives rise to social norms and prejudices from which nobody can escape. There is no rational or gradual solution. In the novel the situation ends in death but socially and politically it must be radical, wholesale revolution.

This paper gives information about Lord Byron (George Gordon) and his family ancestry, as well as his being an Inner-Circle member, with Inner-Circle friends. The purpose of this paper is to further and better educate people to the true nature of history and of those who wrote literature and history. The aim is that by more people knowing of the Inner-Circle and its existence that they will be better able to understand it and benefit from the knowledge of what they left us. With this knowledge, we hold the key to knowing what the past was actually like; and once knowing that, we can better know what to do in terms of our future.

This contribution intends to assess the web of intertextual references in Mary Shelley's drama "Proserpine" (1820), an early example of Romantic interest in revisionist mythology. The few critical efforts on the text focus on its transposition of the Ovidian narrative and its proto-feminist instances of mythical revisionism. Shelley's adaptation primarily concerns characterization, structure and intended audience. In light of Ostriker's (1980) suggestion that revisionist myth-making in women's literary production constitutes a significant reshaping of shared culture and personal identity, Proserpine generally reads as a tale of defiance against patriarchal violence. The thoroughness of the existing scholarship on its portrayal of gender performance calls for an evidence-based study of the text as a literary adaptation. With reference specifically to Ovid's episode of Proserpine's rape in the "Metamorphoses" 5.346 ff, the article assesses Shelley's analogue in light of its performative component.

Biographies are classified as diverse kinds of the genre that is combined with various elements. Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando Aphra Behn becomes the first professional woman writer, Mary Shelley is considered to be the foremother of science fiction and gothic genre, finally pioneer feminist  writer  Virginia  Woolf  created  a  fictional,  gender-bending  biography  that  paid  tribute  to  the  British literature. These three significant women writers have become pioneers throughout three  centuries. This article reviews the autobiographical  elements  in Behn’s Oroonoko (1688),  Shelley’s Frankenstein;  or,  The  Modern Prometheus (1818)  and Woolf’s Orlando(1928)  considering  the  sociocultural  backgrounds  of each  period  in Britain as well as regarding the authors’ contributions to the British literary canon.

Um breve ensaio sobre aquele que é considerado por mim um dos melhores autores que já pisou na terra, é uma forma de homenagea-lo e também agregar à futuras pesquisas que irei fazer sobre o mesmo logo mais. É uma coletânea de pesquisas e traduções feitas por mim de artigos que não estão disponiveis em português, além de adições de pesquisas pessoas, tornando esse ensaio ainda mais completo.

The handbook offers a comprehensive introduction to the British novel in the long eighteenth century, when this genre emerged to develop into the period’s most versatile and popular literary form. Part I features six systematic chapters that discuss literary, intellectual, socio-economic, and political contexts, providing innovative approaches to issues such as sense and sentiment, gender considerations, formal characteristics, economic history, enlightened and radical concepts of citizenship and human rights, ecological ramifications, and Britain’s growing global involvement. Part II presents twenty-five analytical chapters that attend to individual novels, some canonical and others recently recovered. These analyses engage the debates outlined in the systematic chapters, undertaking in-depth readings that both contextualize the works and draw on relevant criticism, literary theory, and cultural perspectives. The handbook’s breadth and depth, clear presentation, and lucid language make it attractive and accessible to scholar and student alike.

The principal point of this argument is that Godwin’s Fleetwood should be read as a queer novel not simply because it chronicles a bad marriage and the failure of heterosexual love to fully flourish and solidify normative bonds, but because the three-volume structure of Fleetwood, or the New Man of Feeling circles back on itself, ouroboros-like, in keeping with the cyclicity of male shame. And just as gender is the result of certain mannerisms and acts of cloaking, shame is another performative forged, as it were, by and through a continuous process of accepting and resisting the social roles assigned to us. An ancillary aim is to trace Godwin’s depiction of male shame in Fleetwood to the literature of sensibility in eighteenth-century Britain, particularly the Man of Feeling at his most ashamed state, which this writer exploited for his own literary and cultural objectives.  His depiction of shame intersects in remarkable ways with later attempts to assimilate the history of shame into the history of homosexuality.

Special issue of the international peer-reviewed "L'analisi linguistica e letteraria"
Contributions by
Francesco Rognoni | Marco Canani and Valentina Varinelli | Kelvin Everest | Will Bowers | Carla Pomarè | Marco Canani | Alberto Bentoglio | Anna Anselmo | Antonella Braida | Lilla Maria Crisafulli | Michael Rossington

“Patagonian Giants, Frankenstein’s Creature, and Contact Zone Catastrophe” historicizes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as an intervention in the discourse of exploration predicated upon the Creature’s affinities with the pseudo-scientific Patagonian giants of eighteenth-century debate. Famously associated with the circumnavigator John Byron, described by his grandson Lord Byron, and evidently known to Mary Shelley from her reading, the Patagonian Giants strikingly resemble Frankenstein’s eight feet tall, ice-dwelling Creature. I enlist Mary Louise Pratt’s investigation of representations of encounters in the “contact zones” to reconstruct the important context of three centuries of European reports of Patagonian giants, trace Mary Shelley’s evident exposure to the legend of the giants and their meeting with Commodore John Byron, and argue that by displacing, replacing, and surpassing Robert Walton in the role of explorer-protagonist, the Patagonian-like Creature reproduces the violent actions and rhetoric of...

Paru dans Viatica, mars 2016.  Disponible en ligne sur http://viatica.univ-bpclermont.fr/ecrire-le-voyage-deux-travel-writing-partnership/dossier/s-ou-m-voyage-et-auctorialite-dans-histoire-d-un-voyage-de-six-semaines-1817-de-mary-shelley-et-percy-bysshe-shelley

... at this time: the political force always latent in, or extracted from the letter of fiction, takes over the public image of the letter. When the disturbing power of the letter comes to the fore, as it does in Marat Assassine', it not only challenges the formal order of" official art," but, more ...