Groundless metaphors and living maps in the writing of

Death hunts through time. The English stand on time. This strip of time is Dover, where they await their crossing. Time is abstracted place where the real stand. It is Dover where allegory, place, abstraction, figures and plot meet and stop. These stylistic traits may be considered in relation to some of the conclusions Sophie Thomas draws in relation to The Last Man. For Thomas the isssue of the uncontainable is central to the novel. She finds “some infectiousness at play on the level of metaphor, as characters are ruined by ruins” (Thomas, 25) and argues “At issue in the novel, however, is not the boundless aspiration of the poetic imagination the obvious province and provenance of the Romantic fragment but boundlessness as such” (Thomas, 23). Although, Thomas considers proliferation to characterize this text as its “paradoxical dynamic” (Thomas, 22) instead of the dead-end infectiousness I find, we both seem in accord as regards the antiRomanticism implicit in Shelley’s writing. Nature groundless metaphors Shelley’s use of dizzingly self-referential metaphors is akin to her habit of foregrounding the literary sources of the text. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley amongst many others are summoned up in her texts, but not integrated. In fact, Shelley often exploits the dialogic possibilities to the full, as different poets and philosophers are left to fight it out. Frankenstein, The Last Man and Valperga all contain passages that appeal to a Wordsworthian concept of nature, only to compromise it by foregrounding its contingency or relativity. She refuses to allow the concept of Nature the status of “ground” in a Wordsworthian manner. Neither does she allow any kind of Percy Bysshe Shelley-like dialogue or interaction with nature and to underscore her refusal Frankenstein experiences nature at its most unresponsive on Mont Blanc. In Frankenstein particularly we find conflicting versions of nature. Nature is appealed to as nurse, mother and guardian, but the dynamics of Shelley’s plots ensure that it betrays any such expectations. In all Mary Shelley's works the concept of nature is a problematic construction, used in connection with a range of impossible idealist projects, with ideologies of self, the inscription of identity and the perceiving mind, and the act of writing. Her writing of a multiplicity of