Audrey A. Fisch – författare

Although Frankenstein has now been canonized in the Romantic classroom, less attention than ever has been paid to the considerable corpus of Mary Shelley's other works - in fact, until now the excitement of the last decade over feminist themes found in Frankenstein has helped to obscure the actual persona of its author. This collection of essays however, written by a pre-eminent assemblage of Romantic scholars, begins to sketch a portrait of the "other Mary Shelley"; the writer and intellectual who recognized the turbulent relationship among the various agendae of family, gender, and society, and whose narratives still resonate strongly in the setting of contemporary politics and culture. By analysing a previously neglected body of reviews, essays, novellas, letters, biographies, sketches, and tales, and in locating Mary Shelley as a shrewd critic of the Romantic zeitgeist, the essays in this volume offer a ground-breaking, complete evaluation of one of the foremost thinkers of the 19th century.

Audrey Fisch's study, first published in 2000, examines the circulation within England of the people and ideas of the black Abolitionist campaign. During the 1850s, African-Americans and others active in the campaign to abolish slavery, journeyed to England to present the slave experience and rouse opposition to American slavery. By focusing on Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, an anonymous sequel to that novel, Uncle Tom in England, and John Brown's Slave Life in Georgia, and the lecture tours of free blacks and ex-slaves, Fisch follows the discourse of American abolitionism as it moved across the Atlantic and was reshaped by domestic Victorian debates about popular culture and taste, the worker versus the slave, popular education, and working class self-improvement. Despite its popular appeal, she claims, the African-American abolitionist campaign actually re-energised English nationalism. This book will be of interest to students of African-American literature, and nineteenth-century American and English literature.