'All the World's a Stage': Dramatic Sensibility in Mary Shelley's Novels

This book examines the often tragic and nearly always disabling metaphor of thetheatrum mundi, world-as-stage, as it plays itself out in the characters of Mary Shelley's novels fromFrankenstein, Mathilda, ValpergaandThe Last MantoThe Fortunes of PerkinWarbeck, Lodore and Falkner. Perceiving the world as a stage on which to enact one's personal ambition or to impose one's restructured version of life's 'drama', the characters in these novels, Bunnell shows, confuse the boundaries between illusion/reality, self/other and public/private to disastrous ends for themselves and those around them. In addition to an illuminating reading of Shelley's six novels and the novellaMathilde, Bunnell provides essential biographical and historical information and composition history of the texts and also broadens the narrow scope of Shelley's reception.