The notion, which has persisted over many years, of Mary Shelley as the conservative daughter of a radical, proto-feminist mother can be traced to the views of Edward Trelawney, a contemporary and fair-weather friend of Shelley. This study, by exploring female identity, largely in terms of modern feminist psychoanalytic theory, in several of Shelley's lesser-known novels, attempts to contribute to the efforts of those who have challenged such notions and who have strived to render a more accurate portrait of Mary Shelley. / Anne Mellor's discussion of female identity in Shelley's sentimental novels, Mathilda, Lodore and Falkner, (in her book Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters) does much to dispel the notion of Shelley's apathy with regard to gender politics. Mellor convincingly argues that these novels celebrate what she terms the "relational" identity of their heroines, and thus "support a feminist position which argues that female culture is morally superior to male culture." She further maintains, however, that these novels simultaneously reveal the damage that such an identity can do to a woman's personal development. / My paper challenges Mellor's assertion that Lodore and Falkner Shelley's last novels, portray relational identity with ambivalence. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

This thesis argues that in the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius Shelley found an insight into the role of contingency in physical and historical process which allowed him to go beyond the limitations of an intellectual inheritance divided between post-Kantian Romanticism and the sceptical revolutionary Enlightenment. This insight entails radical implications for our understanding of the political role of the literary text. Shelley conceives society in evolutionary terms, making poetry a revolutionary clinamen (or mutation) in the iterative cycles of social reproduction. Models drawn from contemporary chaos theory help us to understand how this entropic tendency to disorder can work simultaneously as a negentropic motor of social innovation. Building on the work of Michel Serres, who demonstrates that Lucretius anticipates the recent scientific interest in "determinate indeterminacy," this thesis shows that Shelley's understanding of historical process and the role of the poet in social reproduction has anticipated some of the implications of contemporary "chaos science" in ways that suggest models for the general application of this new paradigm of contemporary scientific thought to literary and political issues.

The English Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century wrote numerous poems from genres and styles all across the poetic spectrum. From the epics of ancient origin concerning kings and fanciful settings to the political odes on fallen leaders and even the anthropological histories of what it meant to live in their time, these poets stretched their stylistic legs in many ways. One of the most interesting is their use of the short and rule-bound sonnet form that enjoyed a reemergence during their time. Though stylized throughout its existence, the sonnet most often falls into a specific form with guidelines and rule. What makes the Romantic interest in this form noteworthy is that like the other forms, they found new ways to use the sonnet as a means of poetic experimentation and creative expression. Exploring the various internal and external variations, those changes that took place within the lines and phrases of the sonnet and those that form the organizing and rhyming portions of the poem, this study seeks to establish the ways the Romantics took the uniform techniques of the sonnet and stretched its bounds to find new means of creativity. Close reading of the poems of William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley reveals the variant use of caesura, creative dissonance, as well as original organization and rhyme scheme to accomplish purely Romantic goals within the uniformity of the sonnet form.

This essay – Discourse and Dissonance – deals with Mary Shelley’s gothic novel Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818). The focal point is the construction of “Them and Us”, as defined by scholars such as Stuart Hall, viewed in terms of the following categories: race, gender and family, class, and sexuality. Rather than applying an outside perspective, e.g. a feminist or Marxist one, to the text, I use Cultural Criticism as described by Arthur Asa Berger in order to deconstruct and reconstruct the discourse, as explained by Michel Foucault, within Shelley’s work. In doing so, I view the hermeneutics of suspicion as the starting point due to its recognition of every text’s hidden truth. Stephen Greenblatt’s term dissonance is useful for the study’s aim of finding the differences and similarities in the voices of the novel’s characters. Intersectionality functions as the tool with which I intertwine the above categories in my analysis.     In conclusion Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus does not convey a message of conformity. Its class-, race- and gender-bound discourse is reproduced in the text, but simultaneously challenged. The dissonant voices of the novel show the discourse from different perspectives and make it obvious that there are cracks on the surface of the discourse, which Shelley deepens by putting it into writing – whether she was aware of it or not.

No substantial studies, at least to my knowledge, have yet been dedicated either to Milton's or to Shelley's extensive poetic use of the grotesque. This omission surprises me, especially given the voluminous critical attention both authors receive. Neither Milton nor Shelley's grotesquerie can be viewed as the basis of artistic method or artistic achievement as we might with, say, Rabelais, or Poe, or even Kafka. And neither Milton nor Shelley is self-consciously an artist of "the grotesque." In fact, Milton, from his seventeenth century perspective, would scarcely have regarded the term as being applicable to literary criticism at all. And as a late Romantic, Shelley defined himself rather as a poet of the imagination. Nonetheless I will show that both artists avail themselves of a grotesque aesthetic to achieve some of their most powerful and provocative poetry: we may here consider, for instance, Milton's memorable descriptions of the incongruities of Hell and the deformities of its fallen denizens in Paradise Lost, or Shelley's Gothic touches and his perplexing distortion of conventional linguistic and dramatic form in Prometheus Unbound. / Aside from general considerations of the grotesque in these texts, I will especially focus on how Milton's and Shelley's uses of the grotesque mode provide us with unique, and often fascinating vantage points from which to appreciate their respective political concerns and revolutionary interests. While I expect this critical approach will elucidate Milton and Shelley in their own separate artistic and political spheres, I am especially interested to compare and contrast the poets, to show how the quite different uses made of the grotesque in Prometheus Unbound and Paradise Lost reflect the various ways in which Shelley responds to Milton in his role as a revolutionary forefather.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 1989. / Submitted to the Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 209-215). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

Thesis (doctoral)--Amsterdam.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 47-48).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 293-309).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 47-48). Also available in print.