Lucy Morrison

Staci L. Stone

Frankenstein is one of the most popular classroom texts in high school and college, and Shelley's other works are attracting renewed attention. This reference is a comprehensive guide to her life and career. Included are hundreds of alphabetically arranged entries about her works, friends, relatives, residences, fictional characters, allusions, and more. Mary Shelley has only recently emerged from the shadows of her famous parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and that of her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Today, Frankenstein (1818, 1831) is one of the most popular classroom texts in high school and college, and Mary Shelley's other works are attracting renewed attention. These works reveal much about the Romantic literary period and Shelley's ongoing development as a writer. In addition to her novels, Shelley wrote short stories, poems, and dramas. These texts illustrate the difficulties of a shifting literary marketplace, while her travel writings illuminate her rich personal experiences and keen intellect. This reference is a comprehensive guide to her life and career. Included are hundreds of alphabetically arranged entries about her works, friends, relatives, residences, fictional characters, allusions, and more. Some entries briefly identify and contextualize their topics, while others offer more extensive discussions. Many entries cite sources of further information, and the volume closes with a bibliography. The work is fully cross-referenced and includes a detailed index and an appendix that discusses the sources of Shelley's quotations.

A Mary Shelley Encyclopedia

Judith E. Pike

Composed of serialized works, poems, short tales, and novellas, Charlotte Brontë's juvenilia merit serious scholarly attention as revelatory works in and of themselves as well as for what they tell us about the development of Brontë as a writer. This timely collection attends to both critical strands, positioning Brontë as an author whose career encompassed the Romantic and Victorian eras and delving into the developing nineteenth century's literary concerns as well as the growth of the writer's mind. As the contributors show, Brontë's authorship took shape among the pages of her juvenilia, as figures from Brontë's childhood experience of the world such as Wellington and Napoleon transmuted to her fictional pages, while her siblings' works and worlds both overlapped with and extended beyond her own.

New Essays from the Juvenilia to the Major Works

Charlotte Brontë from the Beginnings

Benjamin Colbert

This book explores the boundaries of British continental travel and tourism in the nineteenth century, stretching from Norway to Bulgaria, from visitors’ albums to missionary efforts, from juvenilia to joint authorship. The essay topics invoke new aesthetics of travel as consumption, travel as satire, and of the developing culture of tourism. Chronologically arranged, the book charts the growth and permutations of this new consumerist ideology of travel driven by the desires of both men and women: the insatiable appetite for new accounts of old routes as well as appropriation of the new; interart reproductions of description and illustration; and wider cultural manifestations of tourism within popular entertainment and domestic settings. Continental tourism provides multiple perspectives with wide-ranging coverage of cultural phenomena increasingly incorporated into and affected by the nineteenth-century continental tour. The essays suggest the coextension of travel alongside experiential boundaries and reveal the emergence of a consumerist attitude toward travel that persists in the present day.

Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814–1900

Paula R. Feldman

Provides hundreds of alphabetically arranged entries on Mary Shelley's life, career, and writings.

This collection of essays expands critical consideration of Mary Shelley’s placement within the age we call “Romantic,” wherein her texts converse with those of her family, her circle, and her contemporaries. Several essays address particularly how her texts interact with those of her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, revealing new depth and breadth to their literary partnership. Others investigate interdisciplinary perspectives, such as her pieces in The Liberal or the ways in which the figure of Scheherezade haunts her works, while several essays also consider Mary Shelley’s textual relationships with contemporaries such as Thomas Moore and John Polidori. Still others tackle topics such as geopolitical relationships and the growth of opera as an art form, considering Mary Shelley’s commentary upon such contemporary issues, while William Godwin’s textual relationship with his daughter is further investigated. This collection suggests Mary Shelley’s texts merit further investigation not only for what they reveal about their author and her oeuvre, but for the ways in which they illuminate our understanding of the contexts in which they were composed.

Lucy Morrison

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