University of Richmond UR Scholarship Repository Master's Theses Student Research 1991 The voice unbound : Mary Shelley's vision of romanticism Courtenay Noelle Smith Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.richmond.edu/masters-theses Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Smith, Courtenay Noelle, "The ov ice unbound : Mary Shelley's vision of romanticism" (1991). Master's Theses. Paper 1028. This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Research at UR Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Theses by an authorized administrator of UR Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. The Voice Unbound: Mary Shelley's Vision of Romanticism Courtenay Noelle Smith M.A., University of Richmond, August 1991 Professor Terryl Givens, Thesis Advisor Mary Shelley was propelled into fame while still a teenager because of her powerful and "gothic" novel Frankenstein. This novel and several facts about the author's personal life have kept her in the public eye since her death. Though Frankenstein has long been a subject of scholarship, Mary Shelley has been little studied directly in relation to the great literary movement, Romanticism, in which she participated Romantic literature is pervaded by numerous political and aesthetic tensions, in particular the paradox of the ideals of genius and fellowship. In many of the Romantic works readers and scholars will find that the poets largely consign themselves to achieving one of these ideals, namely genius, at the cost of sacrificing the other, fellowship. The poets themselves either did not believe this paradox was reconcilable or did not seek for an alternative resolution.