The Neglected Shelley

New editions and facsimiles of Percy Bysshe Shelley's works are changing the landscape of Shelley studies by making complete compositions and fragments that have received only limited critical attention readily available to scholars. Building on the work begun in Weinberg and Webb's 2009 volume, The Unfamiliar Shelley, The Neglected Shelley sheds light on the breadth and depth of Shelley's oeuvre, including the poet's earliest work, written when he was not yet twenty and was experimenting with gothic romances, and other striking forms of literary expression, such as two collections of provocative verse. There are discussions of Shelley's collaboration with Mary Shelley in the composition of Frankenstein, and his skill as a translator of Greek poetry and drama, reflecting his urgent concern with Greek culture. His contributions to prose are the focus of essays on his letters, the subversive notes to Queen Mab, and his complex engagement with Jewish culture. Shelley's considerable corpus of fragments is well-represented in contributions on the later narrative fiction, 'Athanase'/'Prince Athanase', and the significant group of unfinished poems, including 'Mazenghi', 'Fiordispina', 'Ginevra' and 'The Boat on the Serchio', that treat Italian topics. Finally, there are explorations of subtle though neglected or underestimated works such as Rosalind and Helen, The Sensitive-Plant, and the verse-drama Hellas. The Neglected Shelley shows that even the poet's apparently slighter works are important in their own right and are richly instructive as expressions of Shelley's developing art of composition and the diverse interests he pursued throughout his career.

“Some of the strongest essays of recent times on Shelley’s work . . . A valuable piece of criticism.” —Byron Journal 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—author of six novels, five volumes of biographical lives, two travel books, and numerous short stories, essays, and reviews—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 and misunderstood writer who, the editors remind us, spent nearly three decades at the center of England’s literary world during the country’s profound transition between the Romantic and Victorian eras. 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 her 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.

Building on the work begun in Weinberg and Webb's 2009 collection, The Unfamiliar Shelley, this new collection takes up further work by Percy Bysshe Shelley that has received inadequate critical attention. The Neglected Shelley shows that even the poet's apparently slighter works are important in their own right and are richly instructive as expressions of Shelley's developing art of composition and diverse interests throughout his career.

The Last Man is an apocalyptic science fiction novel. The book tells of a future world (the first-person narrative is that of a man living at the end of the 21st century) that has been ravaged by a plague. The novel was harshly reviewed at the time, and was virtually unknown until a scholarly revival beginning in the 1960s.

Focusing on Shelley's 'Italian experience', the present study both addresses itself to the living context which nurtured Shelley's creativity, and explores a neglected but essential component of his work. The poet's four years of self-exile in Italy (1818-1822) were, in fact, the most decisive of his career. As he responded to Italy, his poetry acquired a new subtlety and complexity of vision. Endowed with remarkably keen powers of absorption, the poet imaginatively reshaped the rich cultural heritage of Italy and the vital qualities of its landscape and climate.

This volume considers the work and life of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851). It looks not only at Frankenstein and its composition, sources, themes and reception but at the wide range of other work by Shelley including such novels as The Last Man and Mathilda and her tales, reviews, travel writing and the (until recently neglected) Literary Lives of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French writers. There are detailed entries on her personal and/or literary relationship with her parents Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron, Coleridge and Claire Clairmont; on her religion, feminism, politics, relation to Romanticism, portraits and representation in drama, film and television; and on the influence of her work on such writers as Poe, Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontës, Dickens and H.G. Wells.

Shortlisted for the University English Book Prize 2022Shelley’s Broken World is a provocative and profound reassessment of Shelley’s poetic art and thought.Bysshe Inigo Coffey returns to a peculiarity of Shelley’s expressive repertoire first noticed by his Victorian readers and editors: his innovatory use of pauses, which registered as irregularities in ears untuned to his innovations. But his pauses are more than a quirk; various intermittences are at the centre of Shelley’s artistry and his thought. This book aims to transform the philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic contexts in which Shelley is positioned. It offers a ground-breaking analysis of his reading, and is the first study to refer to and include images of the unpublished ‘Marlow List’, a record of the books Shelley left behind him on his departure for Italy in 1818. Shelley’s prosody grew to articulate his sense that actuality is experienced as ruptured and fractured with gaps and limit-points.He shows us the weakness of the actual. As we approach the bicentenary of the poet’s death, Shelley’s Broken World provides an exciting new beginning for the study of a major Romantic poet, the history of materialism, and prosody.

In Harvester of Hearts, Rachel Feder offers fascinating new analyses of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Mathilda that explore the fictional texts' connections to Shelley's experiences of motherhood and maternal loss, twentieth-century feminists' interests in and attachments to Mary Shelley, and the critic's own experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood.