Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives

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Helen M. Buss, D. L. Macdonald, Anne McWhir
Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press, 1 de gen. 2006 - 340 pàgines

Pioneers in life writing, 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. They are both responsible for opening up new possibilities for women in genres traditionally dominated by men.

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. It also includes a full-length play by award-winning Canadian playwright Rose Scollard. Together, the essays and the play explore the connections between mother and daughter, between writing and life, and between criticism and creation. They offer a new understanding of two important writers, of a literary period, and of emergent modes of life writing.

Essayists include Judith Barbour, Betty T. Bennett, Anne K. Mellor, Charles E. Robinson, Eleanor Ty, and Lisa Vargo. Among the works discussed are Wollstonecraft’s Vindication, Letters from Norway, and Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman; William Godwin’s Memoirs of Wollstonecraft; and Shelley’s Frankenstein, The Last Man, Ladore, and Rambles in Germany and Italy.

Des de l'interior del llibre

Pàgines seleccionades

Continguts

Anatomy and Animation in Frankenstein and The Last Man
159
Lodore as an Imagined Conversation with Mary Wollstonecraft
177
Art Criticism as Life Writing in Mary Shelleys Rambles in Germany and Italy
189
Biographical Imaginings and Mary Shelleys Extant and Missing Correspondence
217
Reflections on Writing Mary Shelleys Life
233
Caves of Fancy
243
Works Cited
295
Contributors
313

An Intersection of Mary Shelleys Frankenstein and Mary Wollstonecrafts A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
127
WritingOther Women in Godwins Life
139
Index
317
Copyright

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Passatges populars

Pàgina 182 - I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste...
Pàgina 235 - You have the husband of your choice, to whom you seem to be unalterably attached, a man of high intellectual attainments, whatever I, and some other persons, may think of his morality...
Pàgina 78 - Nature is the nurse of sentiment, — the true source of taste; — yet what misery, as well as rapture, is produced by a quick perception of the beautiful and sublime, when it is exercised in observing animated nature, when every beauteous feeling and emotion excites responsive sympathy, and the harmonized soul sinks into melancholy, or rises to extasy, just as the chords are touched, like the aeolian harp agitated by the changing wind.
Pàgina 218 - Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded : it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.
Pàgina 48 - You have sometimes wondered, my dear friend, at the extreme affection of my nature. But such is the temperature of my soul. It is not the vivacity of youth, the heyday of existence. For years have I endeavoured to calm an impetuous tide, labouring to make my feelings take an orderly course. It was striving against the stream. I must love and admire with warmth, or I sink into sadness.
Pàgina 78 - ... beautiful and sublime, when it is exercised in observing animated nature, when every beauteous feeling and emotion excites responsive sympathy, and the harmonized soul sinks into melancholy, or rises to extasy, just as the chords are touched, like the aeolian harp agitated by the changing wind. But how dangerous is it to foster these sentiments in such an imperfect state of existence...
Pàgina 57 - I will not call her's a masculine understanding, because I admit not of such an arrogant assumption of reason ; but I contend that it was a sound one, and that her judgment, the matured fruit of profound thinking, was a proof that a woman can acquire judgment, in the full extent of the word.
Pàgina 134 - ... slave by the Turks; recommended by her beauty, she had won the heart of the father of Safie, who married her. The young girl spoke in high and enthusiastic terms of her mother, who, born in freedom, spurned the bondage to which she was now reduced. She instructed her daughter in the tenets of her religion, and taught her to aspire to higher powers of intellect, and an independence of spirit, forbidden to the female followers of Mahomet.
Pàgina 79 - I cannot bear to think of being no more - of losing myself - though existence is often but a painful consciousness of misery; nay, it appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist...

Sobre l'autor (2006)

Helen M. Buss is a professor of English at the University of Calgary. Her book on Canadian women's life writing, Mapping Our Selves, won the Gabrielle Roy Prize. As Margaret Clarke, she has published novels, short stories and poetry. Three of her most recent books published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press are Memoirs from Away: A New Found Land Girlhood, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives, edited with D.L. Macdonald and Anne McWhir, and Working in Women’s Archives edited with Marlene Kadar.

D. L. Macdonald teaches English at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Poor Polidori: A Critical Biography of the Author of “The Vampyre” (1991) and of Monk Lewis (2000).

Anne McWhir is a professor of English at the University of Calgary and has written extensively on William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley and P. B. Shelley.

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