American Sensations

American Sensations
Author: Shelley Streeby
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2002-05-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0520223144

"American Sensations is an erudite and sweeping cultural history of the sensationalist literatures and mass cultures of the American 1848. It is the finest book yet written on the U.S.-Mexican War, and how it was central to the making and unmaking of U.S. mass culture, class, and racial formation."—José David Saldívar, author of Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies "A major work that will challenge current paradigms of nineteenth-century literature and culture. American Sensations brilliantly succeeds in remapping the volatile and shifting terrain of both national identity and literary history in the mid-nineteenth century."—Amy Kaplan, co-editor of Cultures of United States Imperialism

Shelley's Eye

Shelley's Eye
Author: Benjamin Colbert
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351900404

Percy Bysshe Shelley joined the deluge of sightseers that poured onto the Continent after Napoleon's defeat in 1814, and over the next eight years Shelley followed major travelling trends, visiting Switzerland in 1816 and Italy from 1818. Shelley's Eye is the first study to address Shelley's participation in the travel culture of Post-Napoleonic Europe, and the first to consider Shelley as an important travel writer in his own right. This book is informed by original research on a wide range of period travel writings, including Mary Shelley and Shelley's neglected collaboration, History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817), in which 'Mont Blanc' first appeared. Fully responsive to the culture of travel, Shelley's travel prose and poetry form fascinating conversations with major Romantic travellers like Byron, Wollstonecraft, and Wordsworth, as well as lesser-known but widely read travel writers of the day, including Morris Birkbeck, Charlotte Eaton, and John Chetwode Eustace. In this provocative study, Benjamin Colbert demonstrates how the Grand Tour remains a vital cultural metaphor for Shelley and his contemporaries, under pressure from mass travel and popular culture. Shelley's travel prose and 'visionary' poetry explore motives of perception underlying travel discourse and posit an authentic 'aesthetic vision' that reconfigures social, historical, and political meanings of 'sights' from the perspective of an ideal tourist-observer. Shelley's Eye offers a new perspective on Shelley's intellectual history. It is also a timely and important contribution to recent interdisciplinary scholarship that aims to re-evaluate Romantic idealism in the context of physical, experiential, or material cultural practices.

Black Frankenstein

Black Frankenstein
Author: Elizabeth Young
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2008-08-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0814797156

For all the scholarship devoted to Mary Shelley's English novel Frankenstein, there has been surprisingly little attention paid to its role in American culture, and virtually none to its racial resonances in the United States. In Black Frankenstein, Elizabeth Young identifies and interprets the figure of a black American Frankenstein monster as it appears with surprising frequency throughout nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. culture, in fiction, film, essays, oratory, painting, and other media, and in works by both whites and African Americans. Black Frankenstein stories, Young argues, effect four kinds of racial critique: they humanize the slave; they explain, if not justify, black violence; they condemn the slaveowner; and they expose the instability of white power. The black Frankenstein's monster has served as a powerful metaphor for reinforcing racial hierarchy—and as an even more powerful metaphor for shaping anti-racist critique. Illuminating the power of parody and reappropriation, Black Frankenstein tells the story of a metaphor that continues to matter to literature, culture, aesthetics, and politics.

The Cambridge Companion to `Frankenstein'

The Cambridge Companion to `Frankenstein'
Author: Andrew Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2016-08-25
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1107086191

Sixteen original essays by leading scholars on Mary Shelley's novel provide an introduction to Frankenstein and its various critical contexts.

Fair-copy Manuscripts of Shelley's Poems in European and American Libraries

Fair-copy Manuscripts of Shelley's Poems in European and American Libraries
Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 480
Release: 1997
Genre: Manuscripts, English
ISBN: 9780815311515

Makes key resources widely availableThese books provide the only complete record -- much fuller than that available through any other printed source -- of the major manuscripts of Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.Valuable primary informationThese editions -- with their expensive facsimile reproductions, beta-radiographs of the watermarks, detailed bibliographical descriptions, transcriptions, textural notes, collations, bibliographies of relevant studies of the MSS, and indexes -- will remain repositories of primary information on the poems and prose of the younger Romantics for the next century.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Learning
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2013-09
Genre: Horror tales, English
ISBN: 1438139993

"Perhaps best recognized for the horror films it has spawned, 'Frankenstein,' written by 19-year-old Mary Shelley, was first published in 1818. 'Frankenstein' warns against the irresponsible use of science and technology and makes readers reconsider who the world's monsters really are and how society contributes to creating them. Ideal for research or general interest, this resource furnishes students with a collection of the most insightful critical essays available on this Gothic thriller, selected from a variety of literary sources."--

Territories of Empire

Territories of Empire
Author: Andy Doolen
Publisher:
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2014
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199348626

Practically speaking, nineteenth-century American literary history really refers to writings from the East seaboard of the United States. In fact, no author from the West prior to Mark Twain has been admitted into the canon of American literature, a longstanding bias that continues to define the narrative arc of U.S. literary nationalism. Western authors are absent from the canon and classroom largely because their "regional writings" are assumed to be second-rate in comparison with the ostensibly more complex literary cultures of the eastern states. Andy Doolen's monograph reorients literary history, turning to the neglected Western writings that shaped the distinctive process of U.S. expansionism in the years following the Louisiana Purchase. As Doolen shows, these "cartographic texts" legitimated U.S. occupancy of contested border zones and justified the nation's move westward. In five chapters, Territories of Empire surveys an under-studied archive of these texts, ranging from exploration narratives, novels, oratory, and natural histories, to autobiographies, travel narratives, poetry, and periodical literature. In writings as dissimilar as protest petitions from white Louisianans, Kentucky newspaper accounts of the Burr conspiracy, the explorer Zebulon Pike's 1810 account of the upper Rio Grande, and Timothy Flint's 1826 novel about a young New Englander who fights in the Mexican independence struggle, Americans were expanding the national imagination into new continental dimensions. Ultimately, these texts show how literature reflected and fed the expansionist ideology of the U.S. by linking national greatness to the urgent necessity of territorial and commercial growth.