Stuart Curran

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 Englands literary world during the countrys profound transition between the Romantic and Victorian eras. The essays in this volume demonstrate the importance of Mary Shelleys neglected novels, including Matilda, Valperga, The Last Man, and Falkner. Other topics include Mary Shelleys work in various literary genres, her editing of her husbands 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 womens studies.

Romanticism and Enlightenment

The new age proclaims itself to be fleet of foot, with wings on its soles; the dawn has put on seven-league boots - Long has lightning flashed on the horizon of poetry; the heavens have collected their stormy might into a powerful cloud; now the thunder has resounded mightily, now it has retreated and flashed only in the distance, now it has returned yet more fearsomely: but soon we shall speak not of a single storm, but the entire sky will break out into flame, and then all your petty lightning rods will avail no longer. Then the nineteenth century begins in earnest. . . Then there will be readers who can read. Schlegel, “Uber die Unverstandlichkeit” Romanticisms and Enlightenments The readers of this volume will find Lovejoys famous essay “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms” amply confirmed: Romanticism cannot be defined. To include an essay called “Romanticism and Enlightenment” seems to be an impossibility compounded. On any reasonably comprehensive view the eighteenth century was not dramatically more uniform than the early nineteenth. Indeed, in one crucial respect it was less so, for no fact so inescapably galvanized the Enlightenment mind as that of revolution did the mind of Romanticism. There are many versions of Enlightenment - aristocratic and bourgeois, rationalist and empiricist, modernist and classicist, mercantilist and laissez-faire , urban and pastoral, religious and secular. Properly speaking, this chapter should be entitled “Romanticisms and Enlightenments,” a multiplicity that leaves the student no hook except the little word “and” to hang a hat on.

Romanticism, criticism and theory

The terms of my title will probably seem to some readers rather bland, to others inevitably contentious. Romanticism has functioned as a period term, with somewhat different limits in different countries, and its use has led to a tradition of attempts at defining what it is, or what is most central to it. Criticism tends to pass us by as an unassuming description of what we do if we teach or study literature in universities, while theory is one of those terms that has caused arguments in seminars and tantrums at dinner parties. But criticism is by no means an innocent term, nor need theory always bite in the way that its bark has seemed to promise, if indeed it bite at all. So it may be as well to begin with some working definitions - not trenchant specifications of exclusive or exact definitions of these terms, but loose explanations of what I mean by them, and of how they will function in the following pages. By Romanticism I mean, very roughly, the writings of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, sharing a general historical situation but not necessarily held together by any essential or prescriptive characteristics. Literary critics and historians have traditionally posited such characteristics in a manner allowing them to distinguish between what is more or less “romantic,” early and late romantic, pre- and postromantic, highly or antiromantic. Such usages are seldom consistent, and have mostly been employed to justify one set of preferences over others according to some standard or other of exemplary historicality.

Poetry in an age of revolution

Poets are no more insulated from political events and controversies than are any other class of people. Indeed, they are less so, in that poets work in language , the same medium in which political concepts and demands are formulated, contested, and negotiated. If this is generally true it is of particular relevance in periods of significant historical change, when political issues impress themselves with increased urgency on all sections of society and give rise to vigorous debates concerning fundamental political principles. The period between 1780 and 1830, during which the great Romantic poets came to maturity and produced their most important works, was such a period, as they were all aware. Wordsworth told an American visitor that “although he was known to the world only as a poet, he had given twelve hours thought to the conditions and prospects of society, for one to poetry.” Coleridge and Southey were both active as political journalists, and Coleridge produced a number of significant works of political theory. Byron spoke on political issues in the House of Lords, as well as satirizing political opponents and the political situation in general in his poetry. Shelley wrote to his friend Peacock, “I consider Poetry very subordinate to moral & political science, & if I were well, certainly I should aspire to the latter” (Shelley, Letters , II, 71).

Romantic poetry: why and wherefore?

Ages are marked by literary fashion as much as by their political settlements or upheavals. We speak commonly of Elizabethan drama or of Enlightenment prose, thereby defining the epoch generically and even temperamentally. The continuing preoccupation with “Renaissance self-fashioning” only puts a modern gloss on the conventional notion that it was an age for drama. The eighteenth century has long been conceived as inseparable from its monumental achievements in prose, works reflecting the massive organization and integration of European civilization - the French Encyclopedie , Johnsons Dictionary , even, seemingly almost as long, Richardsons Clarissa. What is it, then, that makes us commonly associate British Romanticism with poetry? Why, indeed, until recently did we generally separate the writers of prose - except for literary theorists like Coleridge and Hazlitt - from the poets, pretending, for instance, that Jane Austen inhabited a world fundamentally different from that of Shelley rather than living at the same time and, indeed, about twenty-five miles from his birthplace, and writing constantly about families that easily could pass for Shelleys own? The Victorians started this conventional association almost as a way of distinguishing their epoch, another age of prose or at least to their minds of robust narrative, from that softer, more emotional, more lyrical world that preceded theirs, an irrecoverable infancy to which they longed to retreat.

Mary Shelley in Her Times@@@The Mental Anatomies of William Godwin and Mary Shelley

This book explores the influence of Enlightenment and Romantic-era theories of the mind on the writings of Godwin and Shelley and examines the ways in which these writers use their fiction to explore such psychological phenomena as ruling passions, madness, the theraputic value of confessions (both spoken and written), and the significance of dreams. Unlike most studies of Godwin and Shelley, it does not privilege their masterworks- for the most part, it focusses on their lesser-known writings. Brewer also considers the works of other Romantic-era writers, as well as the seventeenth- and eighteenth century philospophical and medical theories that informed Godwins and Shelleys presentations of mental states and types of behaviour.

Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World

This collection of essays focuses on Shelleys conception of the poets social role and how that conception has changed over time. It examines the ways in which Shelleys thought engages contemporary debates on feminism, class structure, political representation and human rights, and how it in turn affects radical politics in England. Also considered are the cultural and political forces within Shelleys society and his attempts to establish a new role for the poet in its renovation.