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What is best and most compelling about Mary Shelley in Her Times is the freshness of the perspectives articulated in the essays, the breadth of the material considered, the clarity and energy of the writing itself, and the overall impressiveness of the underlying scholarship. The quality of the work assembled here speaks very well indeed for the future of Romantics scholarship. -- Stephen C. Behrendt, University of Nebraska

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Chapter 1. "Not This Time, Victor!": Mary Shelley's Reversioning of Elizabeth, From Frankenstein to Falkner
Chapter 2. "To Speak In Sanchean Phrase": Cervantes And The Politics of Mary Shelley's History Of A Six Weeks' Tour
Chapter 3. The Impact of Frankenstein
Chapter 4. From The Fields Of Fancy to Matilda: Mary Shelley's Changing Conception of Her Novella
Chapter 5. Mathilda as Dramatic Actress
Chapter 6. Between Romance and History: Possibility and Contingency in Godwin, Leibniz, and Mary Shelley's Valperga
Chapter 7. Future Uncertain: The Republican Tradition and Its Destiny in Valperga
Chapter 8. Reading the End of the World: The Last Man, History, and the Agency of Romantic Authorship
Chapter 9. Kindertotenlieder: Mary Shelley and the Art of Losing
Chapter 10. Politicizing the Personal: Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and the Coterie Novel
Chapter 11. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley: The Female Author Between Public And Private Spheres
Chapter 12. Poetry as Souvenir: Mary Shelley In The Annuals
Chapter 13. "Trying To Make It As Good As I Can": Mary Shelley's Editing of P. B. Shelley's Poetry and Prose
Chapter 14. Mary Shelley's Lives and Reengendering of History
Chapter 15. Blood Sisters: Mary Shelley, Liz Lochhead, and the Monster
Notes
Contributors
Index

About the Author

Betty T. Bennett is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Literature at American University. She is the editor of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: An Introduction, available from Johns Hopkins. Stuart Curran is Vartan Gregorian Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Poetic Form and British Romanticism. A collection of essays about Percy Bysshe Shelley compiled by Bennett and Curran, Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World, is also available from Johns Hopkins.

Reviews

This is a book to be commended not only for the range of topics it offers, but for the way in which it represents a wide range of styles and approaches. -- John Williams British Association for Romantic Studies Bulletin and Review Mary Shelley in Her Times contains some of the strongest essays of recent times on Shelley's work... A valuable piece of criticism. -- Ashley Chantler Byron Journal Refreshing, alternative readings to the until now predominantly psychobiographical approach... The essays by William St Clair and the late Mitzi Myers are particular highlights in this solid collection. -- Heidi Thomson Yearbook of English Studies