Shelley Unbound: Discovering Frankenstein's True Creator
| File:Shelley Unbound Feral House 2013 Cover.jpg Cover | |
| Author | Scott D. de Hart |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subjects | Percy Bysshe Shelley Frankenstein |
| Publisher | Feral House |
Publication date | 2013 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback) |
| Pages | 183 |
| ISBN | 9781936239603 Search this book on  . |
Shelley Unbound: Discovering Frankenstein's True Creator is a 2013 book by Scott D. de Hart, in which the author argues that the poet, dramatist, essayist, and Gothic horror novelist Percy Bysshe Shelley, not his wife Mary Shelley, is the actual author of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). An alternate title of the book is Shelley Unbound: Uncovering Frankenstein's True Creator.
Summary[edit]
Hart argues that Percy Bysshe Shelley, not his wife Mary Shelley, is the author of Frankenstein (1818). Percy Bysshe Shelley did not want his authorship of Frankenstein to be known to the public, so he attributed authorship to Mary Shelley, who was 18 years old when the novel was begun. Hart focused on the inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and outright contradictions in the 1818 preface, written by Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the 1831 introduction written by Mary Shelley. This comparison and analysis purports to show that both Shelley and Mary conspired to maintain a "hoax" that she was the sole author of Frankenstein. But Mary's admission in 1831 that Shelley, in fact, wrote the 1818 Preface, usually written by the author of a novel, not her, and the subsequent examination of the original manuscripts and final drafts proved to Hart that a hoax had been perpetrated.
Reception[edit]
Leslie S. Klinger, in The New Annotated Frankenstein (2017), wrote that "much nonsense has been written" in support of the notion that Frankenstein was written by Percy Shelley, and that while de Hart's book was "otherwise thoughtful", ultimately its conclusions on this topic deserved "little credence".[1]
According to Romanticism scholar Charles E. Robinson, de Hart is one of four people who have argued that Percy Shelley is the principal author of Frankenstein.[2]
Duncan Wu discussed the book in his 30 Great Myths about the Romantics calling it "wishful and credulous" and saying that it "drifts into X-Files territory".[3]
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ↑ Klinger, Leslie S., editor. The New Annotated Frankenstein. p. lxvii. New York: Liveright, 2017.
- ↑ Robinson, Charles E. "Percy Bysshe Shelley's Text(s) in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein", in The Neglected Shelley edited by Alan M. Weinberg and Timothy Webb. London and New York: Routledge, 2015, p. 118, footnote 1.
- ↑ Wu, Duncan. 30 Great Myths about the Romantics. Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons, 2015, page 215-216.
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