Michael Eberle-Sinatra
Mary Shelley’s Fictions
Editor. Mary's Shelley Fictions: From Frankenstein to Falkner. Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. ISBN 0-333-77106-0.
Publisher’s Description:
An extraordinary wealth of new work by established and young scholars on both sides of the Atlantic emerged during Mary Shelley's recent bicentenary year. Michael Eberle-Sinatra has made a representative selection, focusing on current issues and theoretical approaches, and treating Shelley's earlier fiction as inseparable from her neglected later fiction of the 1830s. With this collection, studies of this newly canonised Romantic period author enter a "post-'Beyond-Frankenstein'" era. [click here for more information and/or to order the volume]
Reviews:
"Thanks to the critical ingenuity and scholarship of the contributors to Mary Shelley's Fictions, it is now more difficult than ever to refer to Shelley only as the author of Frankenstein." (Matthew Schneider, The Wordsworth Circle)
"This volume contains essays of a consistently high quality. Mary Shelley's Fictions provides an important contribution to Mary Shelley studies as it goes further than any other collection in looking at the entirety of her fictional corpus. It offers both the specialist and those less familiar with Shelley illuminating readings of aspects of her fiction. Mary Shelley's Fictions redresses the neglect by critics of much of her fiction and makes an irrefutable case for the value and interest in her writings beyond Frankenstein. It can only be hoped that the volume will inspire further inquiry and debate about Shelley's writings, including her reviews, travel writing, lyrics, and literary biographies." (Lisa Vargo, Romantic Circles Reviews)
"In Eberle-Sinatra's anthology, the outstanding offering is Marie Mulvey-Roberts's "The Corpse in the Corpus: Frankenstein, Rewriting Wollstonecraft and the Abject," which synthesizes literary and biographical scholarship with Julia Kristeva's theory of the abject in order to make an arresting argument that "Frankenstein is a parasitic text, being both necrophobic and necrophiliac, that feeds off the nurturing parenting texts that have given it life" (199). The title of Nora Crook's "In Defence of the 1831 Frankenstein" is startling, not only because of the growing critical consensus in favor of the 1818 edition, but also because Crook is the general editor of the current standard scholarly edition of Mary Shelley—the 1996 Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley brought out by William Pickering—whose own text of Frankenstein is based on the 1818 version. But the article turns out to be not a call to reverse the general preference but simply a detailed empirical argument to the effect that the difference between the two editions is less than has generally been supposed. ... Finally, sf scholars perusing this collection may wish to have a look at the two pieces exclusively on The Last Man by Sophie Thomas and Julia M. Wright; Wright's essay is especially notable for employing current theory of nationality and nationalism by writers such as Homi Bhabha and Benedict Anderson in order to analyze the conceptual geography of the novel." (Carl Freedman, Science Fiction Studies)
