Mary Shelley is most known for Frankenstein, but in the decades following the release of her magnum opus, she produced several novels, poems, short stories and other forms of writing. Collected here are ten of Shelley's finest tales that, like Frankenstein, subvert the classist and misogynistic standards of patriarchal Victorian society and offer deep meditations on the nature of life and humanity. Shelley's tales defy genre, ranging from romance and melodrama, to fairy tale and satire, to speculative and the Gothic, all mixed with biographical allusions to Shelley's personal life. Faustian bargains, doppelgängers, time travel and hints of vampirism and witchcraft loom through these stories, and they are infused with Shelley's tender emotionalism and conscious eye for the inequalities of her day. Shelley grounds the Gothic in the humane, leveraging hallmarks of the genre - anachronisms, false heroes, foreboding moods, and shadowy terrains - to show that the darkest monsters may be those already among us.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Acknowledgments
Introduction by Daniel Cook
Bibliography
A Note on the Text
GOTHIC TALES
The Heir of Mondolfo
Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman
Ferdinando Eboli
The Mourner
The Evil Eye
Transformation
The Dream
The Invisible Girl
The Mortal Immortal
The Parvenue
Appendix: On Ghosts
Explanatory Notes
