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Chapter 2 - “O You Pretty Pecksie!”

The Collaborative Process of Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2022

Heather Bozant Witcher
Affiliation:
Auburn University, Montgomery
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Summary

Chapter 2 explores the 1814 collaboration between Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley and extends scholarly attention to their travel journals, before discussing Frankenstein. Using the couple’s shared journal as a way of marking their convergence and redefinition of themselves from a singular identity to a shared pluralism, the journal’s entries witness a shared understanding – a sympathetic concord – between the couple. This close examination of the collaborative process indicates a willingness to assimilate and accommodate the other’s sentiments and formal constructs. While the narratives of these entries show the completion of each other’s thoughts and a reliance upon readerly circulation, the entries’ form also gestures to their defined plural identity through a vocal blending. With its sustained focus on the sympathetic communities developed by the couple and increased literary production as a result of this lived communal experience, I suggest that the Shelley collaboration ultimately shapes the narrative form of Frankenstein. The novel’s layered narrative of sympathetic texts makes possible a view of the collaborative compilation of the novel as a means of social reform: a view of society that relies upon the affective bonds of sympathy with a community of people, whether imaginative or genuine.

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Collaborative Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century
Sympathetic Partnerships and Artistic Creation
, pp. 31 - 63
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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