Mathilda

A new edition of Mary Shelley's second novel Mathilda, which remained unpublished until 1959 due to its themes of suicide and incest. The introduction examines the novel as both a complex exploration of taboo desires and an intergenerational story of reckoning with the horrors of racism and patriarchy.

Deanna P. Koretsky is Associate Professor of English at Spelman College, where she teaches and writes on critical race and gender studies, literatures in English of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and popular culture. Her first book, Death Rights: Romantic Suicide, Race, and the Bounds of Liberalism (2021), shows how cultural representations of suicide inherited from the nineteenth century continue to reinforce anti-Blackness in the modern world. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, UNCF/Mellon, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Rockefeller Foundation, and other prestigious grants and fellowships. In addition to her solo work as a scholar, Koretsky is a founding member of the Bigger 6 Collective.