Mary Shelley and the Gothic Vision of Classical Antiquity

‘Frankenstein’ offers a sinister vision of the familiar scholarly desire to revive the dead. This talk explores how Mary Shelley, in her short stories as well as her novels, used the motifs of Gothic fiction to describe a powerful, ambivalent response to the classical past. Rather than seeing the antiquity a source of edifying examples, Shelley saw something monstrous about the re-emergence of its heroes and ideas in the present. Her Gothic vision of the classics, I argue, offers a way of understanding the ancient world and its ghosts beyond the current critical paradigm of ‘reception’.

This event is co-sponsored by Contexts for Classics.