#15 = Vol. 5, No. 2 = July 1978
David Ketterer
Mary Shelley and Science Fiction: A Select Bibliography Selectively Annotated*
*NOTE. This work was compiled as part of a research project instigated by Professors M. Angenot and D. Suvin and funded by a Quebec FCAC grant.
##1-19. General.
#1. Walter Edwin Peck. "The Biographical Element in the Novels of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley." PMLA, 38 (March 1923), 196-219.
#2. Richard Church. Mary Shelley: A Biography (London: Gerald Howe, 1928).
#3. R. Glynn Grylls [Lady Mander]. Mary Shelley: A Biography (London: Oxford University Press, 1938). Well documented if pedestrian, this remains the standard biography although it should be supplemented by #12 Norman. Appendix E, devoted mainly to Frankenstein ("the first of the Scientific Romances"), includes quotations from contemporary reviews and the speculation that John Trelawny was the first (in a letter, Nov. 27, 1869) to call the monster Frankenstein.
#4. Muriel Spark. Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Hadleigh, Essex: Tower Bridge, 1951). The first part is biographical. The following critical part, using Church's hints (see #2), includes the first recorded identification and analysis of the Doppelganger theme in Frankenstein. The monster equals isolated reason. In spite of the mistiming of important events, the book's power derives from incipient surrealist elements within the overall utilitarian language of realism. Also praise for The Last Man, an abridged version of which forms an appendix.
#5. Ernest J. Lovell, Jr. "Byron and Mary Shelley." Keats-Shelley Journal, 2 (January 1953), 34-49.
#6. Elizabeth Nitchie. Mary Shelley: Author of "Frankenstein" (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953). Thoroughly researched biography. Mentions tales related to Frankenstein: "The Mortal Immortal" (re Cornelius Agrippa's elixir of life), "The Transformation" (doppleganger theme), and an incomplete ms. in Lord Abinger's collection (see #7 Patton) about an ancient Roman brought back to life in modem Italy. This last item, as transcribed by Charles Robinson and entitled "Valerius: The Re-animated Roman" (it might well be called "The Last [Ro]man"), is now available in his edition of Mary's tales (see #19 Robinson) together with a speculative essay that he recently discovered to be by Mary, which is perhaps her most science-fictional piece, and which he entities "Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman" (see #64 Robinson). Appendices include "The Stage History of Frankenstein" and a useful primary bibliography.
#7. Lewis Patton. "The Shelley-Godwin Collection of Lord Abinger." Library Notes, 27 (April 1953), 11-17.
#8. Lowry Nelson, Jr. "Night Thoughts on the Gothic Novel." Yale Review, 52 (Winter 1963), 236-57. Spirited speculation concerning the origins of the gothic novel and the significant role of The Monk and more especially Frankenstein ("science fiction avant la lettre") in the development from supernatural claptrap to the symbolic/ psycho-mythic resonance of Wuthering Heights and Moby-Dick. Frankenstein is a "fictional model of the mind." Final confrontations in Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights and Moby-Dick point to the inseparability of good and evil.
#9. Maurice Levy. Le Roman Gothique Anglais: 1764-1825 (Toulouse: Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines, 1968).
#10. Robert D. Hume. Gothic versus Romantic: A Reevaluation of the Gothic Novel." PMLA, 84 (March 1969), 282-90.
#11. Jean de Palacio. Mary Shelley dans son oeuvre: contribution aux études shelleyenes (Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1969). Most comprehensive critical study avail able. A spectrum of perspectives (historical, biographical, psychological, philosophical, and stylistic) are directed at all of Mary's writings. Appendices include previously unpublished notes, letters, and verse. 55-page bibliography of primary and secondary works.
#12. Sylvia Norman. "Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley." In Shelley and His Circle, ed. K.N. Cameron (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1970), III, 282-90.
#13. William A Walling. Mary Shelley (New York: Twayne, 1972). An excellent, compact, comprehensive, critical biography. Frankenstein, structurally similar to Wuthering Heights, denies concept of a benevolent god. The plague in The Last Man represents dangers of egalitarianism — Mary committed to a conservative eighteenth-century order. A division in her attitude towards Shelley eventually vitiated her art.
#14. Noel Bertram Gerson. Daughter of Earth and Water: A Biography of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (New York, William Morrow, 1973).
#15. G.R. Thompson, ed. The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism (Pullman, Washington: Washington State University Press, 1974).
#16. Claire Tomalin. The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974).
#17. Darko Suvin. "Radical Rhapsody and Romanatic Recoil in the Age of Anticipation: A Chapter in the History of SF." SFS, 2 (Fall 1974), 255-69.
#18. Aija Ozolins. "Recent Work on Mary Shelley and Frankenstein," SFS, 3 (July 1976), 187-202.
#18A. Hartley S. Spott. "Mary Shelley's Last Men: The Truth of Dreams." Studies in the Novel, 7 (Winter 1975), 526-37.
#18B. Lyles, W.H. Mary Shelley: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland Publishing, 1975). Lists printings of Mary's works and secondary material, in English and other languages, in book, article, review, dissertation, and thesis form. A section on Mary in fiction is followed by four appendices including the Legend of George of Frankenstein and a list of theatrical, film, and television versions of Frankenstein.
#18C. Joanna Russ. Introduction to Tales and Short Stories of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Boston: Gregg Press, 1975; rpt. of 1895 ed.), pp. v-xvi.
#19. Charles E. Robinson. "Introduction." Mary Shelley: Collected Tales and Stories (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. xi-xix.
##20-60. Frankenstein.
#20. Sir Walter Scott. "Remarks on Frankenstein...." Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 2 (March 1818), 613-20. The most famous review. Scott assumes Shelley to be the author. Frankenstein placed among works where the marvellous is presented not for its own sake (e.g., Tom Thumb), but for its probable effects on human beings (e.g. Gulliver's "Voyage to Brobdingnag"): "we grant the extraordinary postulates which the author demands as the foundation of his narrative, only on condition of his deducing the consequences with logical precision" (cp. Wellsian SF). After a detailed, perceptive, critical summary, Frankenstein is praised for being "written in plain and forcible English" and for evincing "uncommon powers of imagination."
#21. F.C. Prescott. "Wieland and Frankenstein." American Literature, 2 (May 1930), 192-73. Germinal statement in Wieland: "Had I not rashly set in motion a machine, over whose progress I had no control, and which experience has shown was infinite in power? Every day might add to the catalogue of horrors of which this was the source..." Mary acknowledges influence of epidemic in Arthur Mervyn on The Last Man.
#22. Mario Praz. The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1933): 78, 115-116. Notes similarity in more than name between de Sade's Justine and Justine in Frankenstein.
#23. Milton Millhauser. "The Noble Savage in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein." Notes and Queries, 190 (June 15, 1946), 248-50. Argues that the presentation of the monster as a Rousseauistic "noble savage," combined with the application of Godwinian precepts, conflicts with the dominant Faustian theme.
#23A. Richard P. Adams. "Hawthorne: The Old Manse Period." Tulane Studies in English, 8 (1958), 132, n. 23. Proposes Frankenstein as a probable source for "The Birthmark."
#24. M.A. Goldberg. "Moral and Myth in Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein." Keats-Shelley Journal, 8 (Winter 1959), 27-38. Frankenstein's tale is an exemplum for Walton illustrating the danger of a Satanic/Promethean ambition arising from the assumption "that knowledge is a higher good than love or sympathy." Theme of estrangement (paralleled in Byron's Manfred and Shelley's Alastor) has less to do with Mary's loneliness than with the relationship between happiness and social obligation preached by Godwin and Paine's The Rights of Man.
#25. John L. McKenney. "Nietzsche and the Frankenstein Creature." Dalhousie Review, 41 (Spring 1961), 40-48.
#26. Mary G. Lund. "Mary Shelley and the Monster." The University of Kansas City Review, 28 (June 1962), 253-58. Frankenstein draws on aspects of Mary's life (her loneliness, her intellectual curiosity, her experience with Shelley) and her reading (Caleb Williams, Wieland, Vathek, etc.).
#26A. Christian Kreutz. Das Prometheussymbol in der Dichtung der englischen Romantic. Palaestra Bd. 236 (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1963), pp. 136-52. Chapter on Mary's "Image of Prometheus" discusses sources of Frankenstein, mentioning Shaftesbury's Moralists and Ovid's Metamorphoses but stressing especially Bacon's essay Prometheus, or the State of Man (1609). Frankenstein is a self-destructive and community-destroying, asocial Prometheus, and the novel, a critique of Shelley's Promethean principle, attempts a conservative solution to the romantic crisis. (Information supplied by Darko Suvin.)
#27. James Rieger. "Dr. Polidori and the Genesis of Frankenstein." Studies in English Literature, 3 (Autumn 1963), 461-72. Reprinted slightly revised in The Mutiny Within (see #31 Rieger), pp. 237-47. Cites demonstrable errors in Mary's 1831 Introduction in order to question other details concerning Frankenstein's genesis .It is argued that the inspirational dream which derived from talk about galvanism (and here the role of the disparaged Polidori is emphasized) occurred before the ghost-story competition was proposed.
#28. Burton R. Pollin. "Philosophical and Literary Sources of Frankenstein." Comparative Literature, 17 (Spring 1965), 97-108. While noting the varied influences of Godwin's novels (Caleb Williams, St. Leon, Fleetwood) and Political Justice, Davy's Elements of Chemical Philosophy and Rousseau, emphasis is placed on Pygmalion at Aglatée, a play by Mme. de Genlis (suggested account of the Monster's awakening to societal injustices), Ovid's Metamorphosis which presents Prometheus plasticator, Paradise Lost, and the psychological sensationalism described in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Condillac's Treatise on Sensations and Diderot's Lettre sur les aveugles.
#29. Harold Bloom. "Frankenstein, or The New Prometheus." Partisan Review, 32 (Fall 1965), 611-18. Reprinted as "Afterword" to the Signet Classic Edition of Frankenstein (New York: New American Library, 1965), 212-23; and, with original title, in The Ringers in the Tower (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 119-29. The Prometheus and doppelganger themes are placed in the context of the Romantic mythology of the self (Frankenstein provides a microcosm of Romanticism). The monster, more human than Frankenstein (he is the mind and emotions turned outward, not inward as in his creator's case), becomes a daemon of pure consciousness.
#30. Burton R. Pollin. "'Rappaccini's Daughter' — Sources and Names." Names, 14 (Spring 1961), 40-48.
#31. James Rieger. "Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. (1818)." The Mutiny Within: The Heresies of Percy Bysshe Shelley. (New York: George Braziller, 1967), pp. 81-89. Context indicates how the sense of a monstrous Power embodied in Mont Blanc, as experienced during a visit to Chamonix and le Mer de Glace, figures in both Frankenstein and Shelley's "Mont Blanc." The symbolism of fire and ice, geography and compass direction, is elucidated. Magnetism unites Walton's polar quest and Frankenstein's galvanic experiment.
#32. P.D. Fleck. "Mary Shelley's Notes to Shelley's Poems and Frankenstein." Studies in Romanticism, 16 (Summer 1967), 226-54. Parallel and perhaps superior argument to that in Small's book (see #41). To judge from the titular materials, Mary disapproved of Shelley's abstract idealism. She favoured a realistic tragic humanism. Echoes of Alastor (cp. dream awakenings) point to this difference while echoes of Childe Harold suggest Mary's affinity with Byron (see #5 Lovell).
#33. Mario Praz. "Introductory Essay." Three Gothic Novels, ed. Peter Fairclough (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1968), 7-34. Suggests that Frankenstein was a response to la Mettrie's call in 1748 for "un nouveau Preométhée" to create an artificial man.
#34. M.K. Joseph, ed. "Introduction," etc. Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. vii-xv, etc. Sound, informative Introduction presents Frankenstein in relation to the Prometheus theme as a challenge to Romantic titanism. The apparatus surrounding this, the best edition of the 1831 text, includes appendices (on the book's composition, on references to Prometheus the creator in Shaftesbury's The Moralists — the phrase "modern Prometheus" occurs — and on descriptions in Mary's Journal and a Shelley letter in reaction to a visit to Chamonix); a selective collation of the 1818 and 1831 editions; and Explanatory Notes.
#35. Milton A. Mays. "Frankenstein, Mary Shelley's Black Theodacy." Southern Humanities Review, 3 (Spring 1969), 146-53. Reprinted in SF: The Other Side of Realism (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1971), 171-80. The Faust-myth and Paradise Lost undergo transformation in the world of Frankenstein where "fundamental injustice prevails among men, and, in the allegory of the Monster and his Creator, between man and God."
#36. Masao Miyoshi. The Divided Self: A Perspective on the Literature of the Victorians (New York: New York University Press, 1969), 79-89.
#37. Robert M. Philmus. "Frankenstein; or Faust's Rebellion Against Nature." Into the Unknown: The Evolution of Science Fiction from Francis Godwin to H.G. Wells (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), pp. 82-90. Discusses the "profound dialectical involvement of creature and creator" in the murderous pursuit of power over death.
#38. John Vernon. "Melville's 'The Bell Tower.'" Studies in Short Fiction, 7 (Spring 1970), 264-76.
#39. Wilfred Cude. "Mary Shelley's Modern Prometheus: A Study in the Ethics of Scientific Creativity." Dalhousie Review, 52 (Summer 1972), 212-25.
#40. Robert Kiely. "Frankenstein." The Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1972), 155-73. While Frankenstein's potential greatness is thwarted by circumstance or an imperfection in nature, he is guilty of egotism (which is opposed to the theme of friendship) and usurping the procreative power of women.
#41. Christoper Small. Ariel Like a Harpy: Shelley, Mary and "Frankenstein" (London: Gollancz, 1972). Published in the U.S. as Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein": Tracing the Myth (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973). Chapters covering standard material (Prometheus plasticator, the Godwinian influence, etc.) are followed by a convincing argument for identifying Frankenstein and his monster with Shelley (as the positive Ariel who provided the name of his boat and the unacknowledged Caliban). Inconsistently (given for example the presentation of Frankenstein and Prometheus Unbound as negative and positive embodiments of the same metaphor), Small overemphasizes the similarities between Mary and Shelley (cp. the unacknowledged Fleck, #32). Final chapters trace simplistically the influence of Frankenstein on science fiction and the questions posed by the mythic sense of the monster as anthropomorphic technology.
#42. Patrick J. Callahan. "Frankenstein, Bacon, and the 'Two Truths.'" Extrapolation, 14 (December 1972), 39-48. Frankenstein rebuts Bacon's faith in the truth potential of scientific reason and suggests need for revelation.
#43. Brian Aldiss. "The Origins of the Species." Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1973), 7-39. Makes a case for Frankenstein, with its balance of the external and the internal, as the first SF novel. A review of the inspirational contexts highlights Eramus Darwin's evolutionary epic Zoonomia. Mary's related works, The Last Man and "The Transformation," are summarized.
#44. Donald F. Glut. The Frankenstein Legend: A Tribute to Mary Shelley and Boris Karloff (Metuchin, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1973).
#45. L.J. Swingle. "Frankenstein's Monster and Its Romantic Relatives: Problems of Knowledge in English Romanticism." Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 15 (Spring 1973), 51-65. The nameless monster, of unknown nature and in the process of becoming, present a typically Romantic challenge to the traditional structure of knowledge. By means of multiple first person narration and episodes involving the conflicting claims of truth and justice, this theme is dramatized.
#46. George Levine. "Frankenstein and the Tradition of Realism." Novel, 7 (Fall 1973), 14-30. The anti-heroic in Frankenstein — the emphasis on domestic affection— looks forward to the realistic novel with its ideals of compromise and moderation. Cp. Crime and Punishment and The Secret Sharer which "explore the psychology of unorthodox aspirations and complicated traditional pieties with metaphysical mystery."
#47. James Rieger, ed. "Introduction," etc. Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818 text), (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1974), pp. xi-xxxvii, etc. Introduction (which claims that Frankenstein is not "a pioneer work of science fiction" reversing a statement in Rieger's 1963 article above) and Note on the Text offer doubtful argument for preferring the original text. Shelley's role as a "minor collaborator" is emphasized. Mary's changes and notes in the copy presented to Mrs. Thomas in 1823 are included either in the text or amongst the annotations. Appendices include a collation of the 1816 and 1831 texts plus Byron's and Polidori's contributions to the ghost-story contest.
#48. Ellen Moers. "Female Gothic: The Monster's Mother." New York Review of Books, March 21, 1974, pp. 24-28. Reprinted in Literary Women (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1976), pp. 91-99. The hideous mixture of birth and death in Mary's biography (her mother's death after her own birth, the death of Harriet Shelley's baby and her suicide, the death of her own premature baby) explains her "fantasy of the newborn as at once monstrous agent of destruction and piteous victim of parental abandonment." A footnote suggests connection with Stephen Crane's "The Monster."
#49. Richard J. Dunn. "Narrative Distance in Frankenstein." Studies in the Novel, 6 (Winter 1974), 408-17.
#50. Radu Florescu (with contributions by Alan Barbour and Matei Cazacu). In Search of Frankenstein (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1975). Handsomely illustrated but unconvincing (see #18 Ozolins) attempt to demonstrate by retracing Mary's steps that she knew about Castle Frankenstein, in Darmstadt, Germany, and the associated legends concerning a dragon-slaying knight (presented as an Appendix but irrelevant to Frankenstein) and Conrad Dippel, the alchemist (who is offered as a source for Frankenstein). The remainder of the book covers standard material (Barbour contributes a badly written account of Frankenstein films all of which are subsequently listed in a "Filmography") if not always accurately — it is implied that Godwin approved of the necromancers that he wrote about and that Mary inherited her mother's radicalism.
#51. Aija. Ozolins. "Dreams and Doctrines in Frankenstein." SFS, 3 (July 1975), 103-19. Frankenstein is the product of oneiric inspiration (Journal recorded dream of revived baby blended with that described in the 1931 Introduction) and didactic development, the one reflected in Frankenstein's dreams and the doppelganger motif, the other in a Godwinian defense of the monster (compared to the pathetic Polyphemus in Ovid's Metamorphoses) and an ambiguous defense of Frankenstein's and Walton's quests.
#52. J.M. Hill. "Frankenstein and the Physiognomy of Desire." American Imago, 32 (Winter 1975), 335-58.
# 3. Gordon D. Hirsch. "The Monster Was a Lady: On the Psychology of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein." Hartford Studies in Literature, 7 (number 3, 1975), 116-53.
#54. Gerhard Joseph. "Frankenstein's Dream: The Child as Father of the Monster." Hartford Studies in Literature, 7 (number 3, 1975), 97-115.
#55. Irving Massey. "Singles and Doubles: Frankenstein." The Gaping Pig: Literature and Metamorphosis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 125-36. As Frankenstein's double, his physicality, the monster's only true love is Frankenstein himself. The polar extremes of ice and fire, the timelessness of abstraction represented by Frankenstein and the seriality of desire represented by the monster, are hypothetically united in conclusion.
#56. Martin Tropp. Mary Shelley's Monster: The Story of "Frankenstein" (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976). Frankenstein's dream following the monster's creation is given a pat Freudian interpretation. Victor's desire to kill everyone in the way of his parents', especially his mother's love is achieved through the doppelganger monster. Recurring image of a boat on water represents surrender to the unconscious. Tropp simplistically over-emphasizes Paradise Lost as a key to the book's meaning and connects the monster with a rampant technology. Other chapters explore the book's various other sources, speculate (à la Small #41) about real life portraits and Mary's psychology, and discuss Frankenstein films. Extensive bibliography.
#56A. Samuel Holmes Vasbinder. "Scientific Attitudes in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Newtonian Monism as a Base for the Novel." Unpublished dissertation, Kent State University, 1976.
#57. John A. Dussinger. "Kinship and Guilt in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" Studies in the Novel, 8 (Spring 1976), 38-55. Confusing essay which makes use of original manuscripts and the first edition to argue that Frankenstein is unconsciously rebelling against the Enlightenment world of his father in favour of an alchemical quest for transcendent unity represented by his mother's womb.
#58. Marc A. Rubenstein. "'My Accursed Origin:' The Search for the Mother in Frankenstein" Studies in Romanticism, 15 (Spring 1976), 165-94. Ingenious argument that Frankenstein's concentric narrative arrangement implies a structural pole which is symbolically equivalent to the polar conclusion. At the structural centre is Safie's mother in a Turkish harem, a portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft. Hints at the Hyperborean myth of a warm polar womb (suggested by the pun on mother and sea in the Mer de Glace and the promised conjunction of fire and ice) are explained in terms of Mary's interest in her own conception and her search for her own mother locked in the ice of death.
#58A. Judith Weissman. "A Reading of Frankenstein as the Complaint of a Political Wife." Colby Literary Quarterly, 12 (1976), 171-80. First extended political reading of the novel. The failure of the French Revolution is associated with the tendency of both Shelley and Frankenstein to put Rousseau's revolutionary idea of the natural man ahead of immediate family obligations.
#59. Irving H. Buchen. "Frankenstein and the Alchemy of Creation and Evolution." The Wordsworth Circle, 8 (Spring 1977), 103-112. Frankenstein attempts to wed the transcendent vision of alchemy to the methodology of science. A creation story, presided over by the alchemists is combined with an evolutionary story, influenced by Locke, Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin. Frankenstein himself presides over the transition from nature-induced to man-induced creation and evolution. In his search for ultimate completion, Frankenstein's act of creation bridges eternity and time but, by omitting the maternal element, he fails to bind eternity to history with the archetype of human development.
#59A. Susan Harris Smith. "Frankenstein: Mary Shelley's Psychic Divisiveness," Women and Literature, 5 (Fall 1977), 42-53.
#59B. Leslie Tannenbaum. "From Filthy Type to Truth: Miltonic Myth in Frankenstein." Keats-Shelley Journal, 26 (1977), 101-13.
##60-65. The Last Man and "Roger Dodsworth."
#60. Hugh J. Luke, Jr. "The Last Man: Mary Shelley's Myth of the Solitary." Prairie Schooner, 39 (Winter 1965/66), 316-17. Enlarged version published as Introduction to his edition of The Last Man (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), pp. vii-viii. Mary's roman à clef monument to her husband: Adrian, Earl of Windsor, son of the abdicated king of England (!)=Shelley; Lionel Verney=Mary; etc. Influences include Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, James Lawrence's utopian Empire of the Nairs, Volney's Ruins of Empire (read by Frankenstein's monster), Shelley's and Wordsworth's poetry. Mary appropriates the Romantic themes of social progress and human isolation (cp. Wordsworth's myth of the Solitary; Lionel's career reverses Wordsworth's three ages of man: alienation, union, intensified alienation).
#61. A.J. Sanbrook. "A Romantic Theme: The Last Man" Forum for Modern Language Studies, 2 (January 1966), 25-33. Late seventeenth-century utopian fantasies led to contrary emphasis on ruins of the past (e.g., Volney's Ruins of Empire) and then those of the future (Mercier's Le tableau de Paris, Gainville's Le dernier homme, Byron's Darkness). Campbell's poem, Beddoes' play, Mary's autobiographical novel, and Hood's ballad all entitled The Last Man.
#62. Jean de Palacio. "Mary Shelley and the 'Last Man': A Minor Romantic Theme" Revue de littérature comparée, 42 (January-March 1968), 3749. Last-man motif was popular in fiction and poetry from 1800 to 1830. Mary's novel takes its place amongst treatments by Gainville and Lesser in France, and by Campbell and Hood in England. While the use of balloon travel may have derived from Gainville's Le dernier homme, there are more similarities between Mary's novel and Hood's poem The Last Man. Subsequently, Bulwer applied the last-of-a-particular-category motif to the historical novel, a development anticipated by an episode in Mary's Perkin Warbeck.
#63. Burton R. Pollin. "The Role of Byron and Mary Shelley in Poe's 'Masque'." Discoveries in Poe (Notre Dame & London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970), pp. 75-90.
#64. Charles E. Robinson. "Mary Shelley and the Roger Dodsworth Hoax." Keats-Shelley Journal, 24 (1975), 20-28.
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