In the circles of fear and desire : a study of Gothic fantasy

Pt. 1. Introduction: Idea, Reality, And The Monster: Realism -- The Pattern: Frankenstein And Austen To Conrad -- Pt. 2. Pre-victorian Realism: Banishing The Monster: Northanger Abbey: From Parody To Novel And The Translated Monster -- Sir Walter Scott: History And The Distancing Of Desire -- Scott And The Death Of The Hero -- Pt. 3. Mid-victorian Realism: Conventions Of The Real: Thackeray: The Legitimate High Priest Of Truth And The Problematics Of The Real -- Thackeray: Some Elements Of Realism -- Pendennis: The Virtue Of The Dilettante's Unbelief -- Trollope: Reality And The Rules Of The Game -- The Landscape Of Reality -- Pt. 4. Transformations Of Reality: Thomas Hardy's The Mayor Of Casterbridge: Reversing The Real -- George Eliot, Conrad, And The Invisible World -- The Hero As Dilettante: Middlemarch And Nostromo -- Epilogue: Lawrence, Frankenstein, And The Reversal Of Realism. George Levine. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. Workers And Slaves: The Rhetoric Of Freedom In The Debate Over Industrialism -- Providential Plot -- Causality Versus Conscience: The Problem Of Form In Mary Barton -- Tailor Unraveled: The Unaccountable I In Kingsley's Alton Locke: Tailor And Poet -- Family And Society: The Rhetoric Of Reconciliation In The Debate Over Industrialism -- Family And Society: The Tropes Of Reconciliation In Popular Industrial Narratives -- Relationship Remembered Against Relationship Forgot: Family And Society In Hard Times And North And South -- Politics Of Representation And The Representation Of Politics In The 1840s -- Politics Of Culture And The Debate Over Representation In The 1860s. Catherine Gallagher. Includes Index. Bibliography: P. [295]-313. This is the original edition which was published in 3 volumes. The cover photograph is of Volume 1. Published anonymously. By Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. First edition. With half-titles. Title page with quote from Milton's Paradise Lost: "Did I request thee, maker, from my clay / To mould me man? Did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me?" Printer statement from title page verso of volume 1; place of printing follows printer. Pagination: volume 1: xii, 181, [3] pages; volume 2: [4], 156 pages; volume 3: [4], 192, [4] pages. Publisher's advertisements on 2 unnumbered pages at end of volume 1 and 2 unnumbered pages at the end of volume 3. Shelley's enduringly popular and rich gothic tale confronts some of the most feared innovations of evolutionism and science--topics such as degeneracy, hereditary disease, and humankind's ability to act as creator of the modern world. This new edition, based on the harder and wittier 1818 version of the text, draws on new research and examines the novel in the context of the controversial radical sciences developing in the years following the Napoleonic Wars, and shows the relationship of Frankenstein's experiment to the contemporary debate between champions of materialistic science and proponents of received religion In The Realistic Imagination , George Levine argues that the Victorian realists and the later modernists were in fact doing similar things in their they were trying to use language to get beyond language. Levine sees the history of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novel as a continuing process in which each generation of writers struggled to escape the grip of convention and attempted to create new language to express their particular sense of reality. As these attempts hardened into new conventions, they generated new attempts to break free. The power and endurance of the Gothic, our fascination with its particular pleasures, are revealed in the virtually mythic status of Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, and that truly Gothic hero, Sherlock Holmes. William Patrick Day explores the Gothic fantasy from its origins in the late eighteenth century, through the conclusion of its first major phase, and on to some of its twentieth-century manifestations.

The original, 1818 text of the Classic novel.

James Hynes

. . .[T]he novel Frankenstein is quite a read. . . .It's highly Romantic, in the literary sense. . .[there is] a good deal of attractive torment and self-doubt, from both Victor Frankenstein and his creation. . . .If ever a book needed to be placed in context, it's Frankenstein. —The New York Times Book Review

Three religious-political debates on the Industrial Reformation, and how those debates bleed into formal difficulties for the "problem novels" of the free-will vs. determinism (on plot, character); family vs. society (on how the relationship between family and society is metaphor or metonymy); facts vs. values (on representation, political and literary). To take the word realism and the idea of representation seriously entails a challenge to the antireferential bias of our criticism and to the method of radical deconstruction that has become a commonplace. Mary Shelley's classic on man's blasphemous attempt to create life is accompanied by commentary on the author and the stylistic, thematic, and mythic aspects of the novel The System Of The Gothic Fantasy -- The Gothic Themes -- The Gothic In The Twentieth Century. William Patrick Day. Includes Index. Bibliography: P. 195-203. Examines the realistic styles of the novels of a variety of British authors, including Thomas Hardy, Anthony Trollope, and Jane Austen