A life with Mary Shelley
by Butler, Judith, Felman, Shoshana, Johnson, Barbara
fromMeridian: crossing aesthetics
"In 1980, deconstructive and psychoanalytic literary theorist Barbara Johnson wrote an essay on Mary Shelley for a colloquium on the writings of Jacques Derrida. The essay marked the beginning of Johnson's lifelong interest in Shelley as well as her first foray into the field of…
"Monsters in novels were connected with the protagonist, representative of a character's personal failings and failings of society. Film adaptations depict the creatures as engaging in senseless violence, suggesting a fear of the uncontrollable. This dichotomy is analyzed throug…
"In 1798, English essayist and novelist William Godwin ignited a transatlantic scandal with Memoirs of the Author of "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman." Most controversial were the details of the romantic liaisons of Godwin's wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, with both American Gil…
Arguing that vision was the dominant mode for understanding suffering in the Romantic era, Elizabeth Dolan shows that Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith and Mary Shelley experimented with aesthetic and scientific visual methods in order to expose the social structures underlyi…
