Common Book 2012-13: Frankenstein: From the Library's Collection

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein, which she wrote at the age of nineteen, is one of the most influential novels ever written. It is remarkable not only for its striking plot and characters but also for its Romantic elements. This new edition of essays, introduced by Harold Bloom, gathers together some of the best criticism available on Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. An earlier edition of this title is also available in print format.

Mary Shelley's life (1797-1851) divides in to three main stages: her childhood, her time with Percy Bysshe Shelley from 1817, and her long widowhood from 1822. This chronology follows the experiences and activities of all three stages, the genesis and publications of her writings (Frankenstein and much else), her travels, friendships, and relationships with other major figures of the Romantic period.

Known from her day to ours as 'the Author of Frankenstein', Mary Shelley indeed created one of the central myths of modernity. But she went on to survive all manner of upheaval - personal, political, and professional - and to produce an oeuvre of bracing intelligence and wide cultural sweep. The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley helps readers to assess for themselves her remarkable body of work. In clear, accessible essays, a distinguished group of scholars place Shelley's works in several historical and aesthetic contexts: literary history, the legacies of her parents William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and of course the life and afterlife, in cinema, robotics and hypertext, of Frankenstein...

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.

Meena Alexander examines the work of three women: Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) the radical feminist who typically thought of life as "warfare" and revolted against the social condition of women; Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855) who lived a private life enclosed by the bonds of femininity, under the protection of her poet brother William and his family; Mary Shelley (1797-1851), the daughter that Wollstonecraft died giving birth to, mistress then wife of the poet Percy Shelley, and precocious author of Frankenstein.

What does hospitality have to do with Romanticism? What are the conditions of a Romantic welcome? Drawing on recent theories of accommodation and estrangement, Peter Melville argues that the texts of Romantic hospitality (including those of Rousseau, Kant, Coleridge, and Mary Shelley) are often troubled by the subject's failure to welcome the Other without also exposing the stranger to some form of hostility or violence...

Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein (1818 ), are now widely regarded as two of the leading writers of the Romantic period. This volume brings together essays on Wollstonecraft's and Shelley's life writing by some of the most prominent scholars in Canada, Australia, and the United States.

Here is the drama of Wollstonecraft's life as a governess in an aristocratic family in Ireland, as an independent writer in London, as an on-the-scene observer of the French Revolution, and as a daring traveler to Scandinavia on the trail of an unsolved crime. Although she died young, her spirit and unconventional ideas lived on in the lives of her daughter, Mary Shelley, and three other heirs who had to contend with a counter-revolutionary age.

Life and literature were inseparable in the daily lives of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Mary Shelley. In England's First Family of Writers, Julie A. Carlson demonstrates how and why the works of these individuals can best be understood within the context of the family unit in which they were created.