This collection covers the lyrical poetry of Mary Shelley, as well as her writings for Lardner's "Cabinet Cyclopaedia of Biography" and some other materials only recently attributed to her.

This collection covers the lyrical poetry of Mary Shelley, as well as her writings for Lardner's "Cabinet Cyclopaedia of Biography" and some other materials only recently attributed to her.

This collection covers the lyrical poetry of Mary Shelley, as well as her writings for Lardner's "Cabinet Cyclopaedia of Biography" and some other materials only recently attributed to her.

This collection covers the lyrical poetry of Mary Shelley, as well as her writings for Lardner's "Cabinet Cyclopaedia of Biography" and some other materials only recently attributed to her.

Publisher description

The Politics of Romanticism examines the relationship between two major traditions which have not been considered in conjunction: British Romanticism and social contract philosophy. She argues that an emerging political vocabulary was translated into a literary vocabulary in social contract theory, which shaped the literature of Romantic Britain, as well as German Idealism, the philosophical tradition through which Romanticism is more usually understood. Beenstock locates the Romantic movement's coherence in contract theory's definitive dilemma: the critical disruption of the individual and the social collective. By looking at the intersection of the social contract, Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, and canonical works of Romanticism and its political culture, her book provides an alternative to the model of retreat which has dominated accounts of Romanticism of the last century.

In this volume, Boldrini examines "heterobiography"—the first-person fictional account of a historic life. Boldrini shows that this mode is widely employed to reflect critically on the historical and philosophical understanding of the human; on individual identity; and on the power relationships that define the subject. In such texts, the grammatical first person becomes the site of an encounter, a stage where the relationships between historical, fictional and authorial subjectivities are played out and explored in the ‘double I’ of author and narrating historical character, of fictional narrator and historical person. Boldrini considers the ethical implications of assuming another’s first-person voice, and the fraught issue of authorial responsibility. Constructions of the body are examined in relation to the material evidence of the subject’s existence. Texts studied include Malouf’s An Imaginary Life, Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang, Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Adair’s The Death of the Author, Banti’s Artemisia, Vázquez Montalbán’s Autobiografía del general Franco. Also discussed, among others: Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, Tabucchi’s The Last Three Days of Fernando Pessoa, Giménez-Bartlett’s Una habitación ajena (A Room of Someone Else’s).