Valperga: or, the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca / Edition 1

by Mary Shelley, Stuart Curran

Overview

Valperga, published in 1823 and reprinted here for the first time, was Mary Shelley's second novel, the successor to Frankenstein. Set in fourteenth-century Tuscany, the novel shares certain structural features with the popular fictions of Sir Walter Scott, most notably the novel Ivanhoe with its contrasting heroines, but Mary Shelley's work pointedly challenges Scott's model, inverting his masculinist and conservative outlook, foregrounding the lives of its principal women, Euthanasia dei Adimari and Beatrice of Ferrara, and attaching to the figure of Castruccio Castracani, Prince of Lucca, a retrograde authoritarianism and sterile lust for power. Valperga, steeped in Mary Shelley's command of local Italian history and culture, offers the vivid pleasures of accomplished historical fiction while at the same time representing in the clash between Castruccio and Euthanasia a struggle between autocracy and liberal democracy that speaks directly to the contemporary political tensions of post-Napoleonic Europe. Timed for Mary Shelley's bicentennial and superbly introduced by Stuart Curran, this exciting new edition makes available a bold yet little-known work by one of the finest minds in English letters.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195108828
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	01/08/1998
Series:	Women Writers in English 1350-1850
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	480
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

University of Pennsylvania

Editorial Reviews

",,,Curran's edition is an excellent resource for scholarly study and an affordable alternative for the classroom....Curran's footnotes are useful, learned and tactful...[and] he provides a suggestive and illuminating chronology and selective bibliography."—The Wordsworth Circle

"Curran dazzles us with the meticulous and thorough editing that we have come to expect from him....an excellent resource for scholarly study....At every step, Curran quietly and thoroughly immerses readers in the complex historical, political, and biographical context of the novel."—Romantic Circles

From the Publisher

Shelley's second novel was written in 1822. Like Frankenstein, this is a dark, moody story that follows the adventures of protagonist Castruccio in 14th-century Italy.

Library Journal