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This course is a graduate seminar, entitled "Mary Shelley Across Borders."
Mary Shelley, a traveler who sojourned across Europe and found a second home in Italy, produced novels and short stories whose characters crossed many national borders, including those of England, France, Switzerland, America, Turkey, Germany, and Russia. As she orchestrates crisscrossing of geographical borders in her work, she also creates new, hybrid literary forms, using components of gothic, sci-fi, historical, futuristic, mythic, and domestic writing. Following her first novel, Frankenstein, Shelley wrote two historical novels (Valperga and Perkin Warbeck), an apocalyptic futuristic novel (The Last Man), a psychological novella (Mathilda), and family sagas that involve transatlantic journeys (Lodore) and trans-European ones (Falkner).While tracking and contextualizing Shelley’s geographical and generic border-crossings, we will deepen our understanding by connecting her works with issues such as technological advancement, global mobility, and the current pandemic. We will examine how critical perspectives such as feminism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, cosmopolitanism, and postcolonialism have contributed to our richer and more complex understanding of Shelley’s oeuvres. We will also integrate a digital humanities component, not only to appreciate her global imagination but to spark new ways of analyzing her (and hopefully others') texts.