By Mary Shelley
From the writer of Frankenstein comes this apocalyptic story of an international devastated by means of plague. Mary Shelley's 1826 roman à clef occurs within the overdue twenty-first century, as England's final king abdicates and a charmed circle of idealistic political reformers plunges right into a maelstrom of conflict, pestilence, and anarchy.
Shelley wrote this gripping novel after the premature deaths of her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their comrade, Lord Byron. She modeled a couple of characters at the charismatic poets and established the narrator—the sole survivor of a pandemic—on her personal personality. This parable of humanity's destruction via plague is commonly considered as a repudiation of Romanticism and its failure to unravel the world's difficulties via paintings and philosophy. It displays the methods utopian beliefs, unchecked via ethical and moral criteria, can shatter society.
Misunderstood by way of nineteenth-century readers, Shelley's visionary novel disappeared for over a century, in basic terms to reemerge to serious acclaim as a precursor of technology fiction and a forerunner of recent apocalyptic stories. Novelist Muriel Spark hailed it because the harbinger of "an completely new style, compounded of the household romance, the Gothic extravaganza, and the sociological novel," and reported it Shelley's "most fascinating, if now not her consummate work."
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Example text
I would also like to thank Dan Franklin, Pascal Cariss and Jason Arthur at Jonathan Cape. Pieces in this book were compiled by Professor James Diedrick. I gratefully salute his skill and acuity. R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling, and on lesser figures like Ian Robinson and Denis Donoghue). 'Literature and society' was, at one time, a phrase so much on everyone's lips that it earned itself an abbreviation: Lit & Soc. And Lit & Soc, I seemed to remember, had been for me a long-running enthusiasm. But when I leafed through the massed manuscripts I found only a handful of essays, all of them written, rather ominously, in the early Seventies (when I was in my early twenties).
Why oh why, he typically asks, is Hollywood so obsessed by Vietnam and so unmoved by the struggle in Kuwait, which, 'amazingly enough', has yet to be celebrated on film? If Dan Quayle were a lot brighter, this is what he would sound like. Despite its contemporary attire, Medved's theme, or plaint, is as old as time. It is Ubi sunt? all over again. Where are they now, the great simplicities of yesterday? In years past, in the heyday of Gary Cooper and Greta Garbo, Jimmy Stewart and Katharine Hepburn, the movie business drew considerable criticism for manufacturing personalities who were larger than life, impossibly noble and appealing individuals who could never exist in the real world.
America is that the moviegoing public doesn't like violence. ' Certainly, Hollywood vs. America got Hollywood thinking, at least for a weekend or two (late nights in the dens of the Moorish mansions). And it got America thinking, too, and the controversy that gathered around it managed to trickle up as high as Janet Reno and Bill Clinton. It was a book, and a mood, whose time had come: the feeling that Hollywood had gone too far in its divergence from the American mainstream; the feeling that Hollywood loved everything that America hated (violence, sex, swearing, drugging, drinking and smoking), and hated everything that America loved (religion, parents, marriage and monogamy, plus the military, policemen, businessmen and America).