“Dark and gripping and tense and beautiful.” —Karen Joy Fowler, New York Times bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club and Pulitzer Prize finalist for We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves Pride and Prejudice meets Frankenstein as Mary Bennet falls for the enigmatic Victor Frankenstein and befriends his monstrous Creature in this clever fusion of two popular classics. Threatened with destruction unless he fashions a wife for his Creature, Victor Frankenstein travels to England where he meets Mary and Kitty Bennet, the remaining unmarried sisters of the Bennet family from Pride and Prejudice. As Mary and Victor become increasingly attracted to each other, the Creature looks on impatiently, waiting for his bride. But where will Victor find a female body from which to create the monster’s mate? Meanwhile, the awkward Mary hopes that Victor will save her from approaching spinsterhood while wondering what dark secret he is keeping from her. Pride and Prometheus fuses the gothic horror of Mary Shelley with the Regency romance of Jane Austen in an exciting novel that combines two age-old stories in a fresh and startling way.

The ancient Greek myth of Prometheus, the primordial Titan who defied the Olympian gods by stealing fire from the heavens as a gift for humanity, enjoyed unprecedented popularity during the Romantic era. An international coterie of writers such as Goethe, Monti, Byron, the Shelleys, Sainte-H ne, Coleridge, Browning, and Bridges engaged with the legend, while composers such as Beethoven, Reichardt, Schubert, Wolf, Liszt, Hal Saint-Sa Holm Faur Parry, Goldmark, and Bargiel based works of diverse genres on the fable. Romantic authors and composers developed a unique perspective on the myth, emphasizing its themes of rebellion, punishment for transgression and creative autonomy, in great contrast to artists of the preceding era, who more characteristically ignored the tribulations of Prometheus and depicted him as the animator of a na Arcadian mankind who, when awakened from their spiritual dormancy, expressed astonishment at the wonders of nature and paid homage to the Titan as a new god. Paul Bertagnolli charts the progress of the myth during the nineteenth century, as it articulates an extraordinary variety of issues pertaining to culture, society, aesthetics, and philosophy. Drawing on archival research, dance history, sketch studies, literary theory, linear analysis, topos theory, and reception history, individual chapters demonstrate that the legend served as a vehicle to express opinions on subjects as diverse as aristocratic patronage, movements of the body on the public stage, rebellion against political and religious authority, outright atheism, humanitarianism of the German Enlightenment, interest in the music of Greek antiquity, industrialization, nationalism inflamed by war, populism, and the aesthetics of musical form. Composers often resorted to varied and unorthodox musical techniques in order to reflect such remarkable subjects: Beethoven outraged critics by implying a key other than the tonic at the outset of the overture to

The myth of Prometheus tells of a powerful Greek Titan who stole fire from Olympus and brought it to Earth as a gift to mankind. He was punished for lighting the world, and modern artists sometimes suffer the same fate. They bring enlightenment only to be shunned; they share parts of themselves only to go mad in the giving. Yet, creation continues, no matter the cost. Sweigart’s creative words bring text alive, and vivid descriptions allow readers to feel pain and despair as well as hear music in their imaginations. The work is challenging in the best of ways as poems entertain until the final page. Prometheus brought light to a dark world, just like artists who pay the price for their brilliance but continue creating anyway.

"In the summer of 1816, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, then eighteen years old, began to write the novel Frankenstein after she and her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley took part in a ghost-story competition at Lord Byron's villa by Lake Geneva. Over the next nine months - a period which saw their return to England in autumn 1816 and subsequent marriage - she (with Percy) drafted the entire novel in a form materially different from the two standard editions of 1818 and 1831, which were based on a later fair copy." "Until now, no one has been able to read what Mary Shelley herself initially wrote in this original draft of the novel. Going back to the unique draft manuscript of the text held in the Bodleian Library, Charles E. Robinson has teased out Percy Shelley's amendments, isolating them from the story in Mary Shelley's hand. Both texts - with and without Percy's interventions - are presented in this edition, allowing us for the first time to read the story in Mary's original hand and also to see how Percy edited his wife's prose."--BOOK JACKET.