This article examines the intersections of queerness, masculinity and heteronormativity in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and its queer adaptation, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). While Rocky Horror is celebrated as a cult classic, its role as an adaptation of Frankenstein has received little attention within Romantic studies. I argue that attention to Rocky Horror as a Shelley adaptation illuminates the author's concern with compulsory heterosexuality and the family, transsexuality, sexual violence against women, and the construction of nineteenth-century masculinities. The depiction of Rocky Horror's Frank-N-Furter, whose creation of Rocky queers Frankenstein's creation of The Monster, critiques and parodies contemporary American gender roles and patriarchal family structures. Ultimately, the article argues that recognizing Rocky Horror as a queer adaptation of Frankenstein not only uncovers queer subtexts within Shelley's novel but also expands our understanding of adaptation studies.
From Wordsworth's poems, Southey's translations, and Coleridge's lectures to Hazlitt's essays, Keats's letters, and Shelley's plays, Romantic art criticism reveals an interest in Italian Renaissance artists, particularly Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian. As their artworks arrived on the British art market for Old Masters after Napoleon's spoliation of Italy, the Romantics encountered them not only in public and private collections but also in prints and books. Indeed, this arrival coincided with the publication of the first English biographies of Italian Renaissance artists. Yet did the Romantics interact with the authors of these biographies? This essay argues that Romantic art criticism and these biographies both emerged from and contributed to a period from 1800 to 1830 that marked a crucial moment in the history of the reception of Italian Renaissance art in Britain - a moment that redefined the style of the Old Masters as an expression of artistic individuality.
This essay considers Percy Bysshe Shelley's 'Mont Blanc' in light of the vast planetary changes that have taken place since Shelley composed the poem in 1816. Mont Blanc and its glaciers were, for Shelley, a symbol of the enduring and indomitable force of nature. Today, these glaciers are on the verge of extinction. I read this alteration through the lens of Rob Nixon's slow violence and find that, in our own time, the hierarchy of power and vulnerability that Shelley establishes in the poem breaks down. This failure of the glacier's power does not represent a failure of Shelley's poetry, however. Rather, it represents a transference of sublime aspect from the mountain to the looming spectre of climate change. I argue that this continuing relevance exemplifies Shelley's characterization of poetry as a fountain forever flowing with new meaning for new circumstances.
'Madame d'Houtetot' was one of Mary Shelley's three contributions to The Liberal, the great collaborative project of the literary left which was shipwrecked by her husband's death. Her character sketch of the salonni & egrave;re who became Rousseau's muse for La Nouvelle H & eacute;lo & iuml;se has gone as 'unnoticed' as its subject, but it is rich with psychobiographical and historiographical riddles. Although the essay has a feminist agenda, depicting a woman of talent treated like a piece of property, MWS seems to shy away from her mother's critique of the ancien r & eacute;gime and from drawing any explicit political conclusions. 'Madame D'Houtetot', interpenetrated by 'A Defence of Poetry' and Leigh Hunt's editorial line, seems to be a genteel contribution to a literary miscellany celebrating cultured intercourse with artistic genius. However, the gate-key to the essay is Lady Morgan's chapter on female society in France, which had included a sympathetic portrait of the same woman to the disgust of the Quarterly Review. By rehabilitating the idol of Rousseau already defended by a b & ecirc;te noire of the right, MWS conducts covert periodical warfare under the cover of historical study.
At the age of eighteen, Shelley, recently expelled from Oxford and returned in ignominy to his ancestral home, Field Place, entered into an epistolary relationship with Elizabeth Hitchener, the teacher of his uncle's children. The letters have received little scrutiny, and yet when examined up close, they provide remarkable insight into the nature of Shelley's mind. In this essay, I explore the many reasons why Shelley entered into an affair of pen and paper with a woman whose age and social class would have rendered impossible any relationship of any kind in the actual world. I trace the increasing intensity of the letters from the merely didactic to those of raw, soul-baring intensity. Also, I focus on Miss Hitchener's responses, which show an imaginative understanding of her young correspondent. Over the course of the 46 letters written from June 1811 to July 1812, Miss Hitchener became for Shelley first student, then mother confessor and finally imagined revolutionary counterpart in a shared vision of remaking the world. Finally, I explore the end of the relationship, which has been recounted by all of Shelley's biographers, but with a failure to understand how Miss Hitchener's life was altered by Shelley.
