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First, yes, yes, all my yes. The more good guides to best-editions for various works that are written, the less time I have to spend tracking them down, which c
by ashark 9y ago
First, yes, yes, all my yes. The more good guides to best-editions for various works that are written, the less time I have to spend tracking them down, which can take a long time for some works (ugh, Eastern works in English translation are hopelessly difficult to assess).
Second:
> It is now frequently required reading in schools, and passing classroom references to “Shelley” may more likely mean Mary than Percy Bysshe (the obscure author of Prometheus Unbound).
This is a joke, or at least intense hyperbole, right? I'd wager way more people have read "Ozymandias" than Frankenstein (unfair because one's a page, and one's hundreds of pages, yes, but still, if we're talking frequency of mention) and several other of his verse works come up fairly often, while little other than Frankenstein does for Mary. If someone just asked "are you familiar with Shelley?" I would 100% for sure think they meant PB. I'd easily concede, of course, that Frankenstein itself is the most well-known (if not most widely-read) thing either of them wrote, though.
- jackfoxy 9y agoI read Ozymandias more than once, but that was decades ago, and you had to remind me of the author. I do think Mary has made a more lasting impression over the centuries. We read and discussed the romantic passages of Frankenstein in my college comparative literature class. I've never read the whole novel...maybe someday.
- ashark 9y agoOh, yeah, it’s immeasurably more influential than anything else either wrote. I just dispute the “mentions of name in classroom” and “who is probably intended by a bare, contextless reference to one ‘Shelley’” metrics.