Oxford World's Classics: Valperga: Or, the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca - Softcover

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft

3.54

256 ratings by Goodreads

9780192832894: Oxford World's Classics: Valperga: Or, the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0192832891 ISBN 13: 9780192832894

Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks, 2000

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"The earth is a wide sea," she cried, "and we its passing bubbles; it is a changeful heaven, and we its smallest and swiftest driven vapours; all changes, all passes nothing is stable, nothing for one moment the same." Valperga (1823), the novel Mary Shelley wrote after Frankenstein, is based on the life of Castruccio Castracani (1281-1328), Prince of Lucca. A brilliant soldier and cruel tyrant, he successfully commanded Ghibelline forces in Tuscany against the Guelphs, threatening Florence, their stronghold. Woven into the story of this factional conflict are the tragice destinies of two heroines, fictional creations of the author. Ethanasia, Countess of Valperga (the name of her castle to the north of Lucca), finds herself increasingly torn between loyalty to her Guelph roots and her affection fro Castruccio which began in childhood. Beatrice, who the author's father, William Godwin, described as 'the jewel of the book', is a heretical Paterin with whom Castruccio falls in love only to abandon. This meticulously researched historical fiction combines a narrative of suspense with a remarkable reconstruction of manners in the Middle Ages. Set in the period of Dante's lifetime, it is also suffused with a poetic spirit which evokes the beauties of Italy's physical environment and points to the melancholy inevitability of change. This edition provides a clear account of the circumstances in which Valperga was composed and published.

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Review:

Curran's edition is an excellent resource for scholarly study and an affordable alternative for the classroom....Curran's footnotes are useful, learned and tactful...and he provides a suggestive and illuminating chronology and selective bibliography. (The Wordsworth Circle)

From the Back Cover:

Valperga, published in 1823 and reprinted here for the first time, was Mary Shelley's second novel, the successor to Frankenstein. Set in fourteenth-century Tuscany, the novel shares certain structural features with the popular fictions of Sir Walter Scott, most notably the novel Ivanhoe with its contrasting heroines, but Mary Shelley's work pointedly challenges Scott's model, inverting his masculinist and conservative outlook, foregrounding the lives of its principal women, Euthanasia dei Adimari and Beatrice of Ferrara, and attaching to the figure of Castruccio Castracani, Prince of Lucca, a retrograde authoritarianism and sterile lust for power. Valperga, steeped in Mary Shelley's command of local Italian history and culture, offers the vivid pleasures of accomplished historical fiction, while at the same time representing in the clash between Castruccio and Euthanasia a struggle between autocracy and liberal democracy that speaks directly to the contemporary political tensions of post-Napoleonic Europe. Timed for Mary Shelley's bicentennial and superbly introduced by Stuart Curran, this exciting new edition makes available a bold yet little-known work by one of the finest minds in English letters.

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