ABSTRACT
Mary Shelley’s first and last published works are travelogues: The History of a Six-Weeks Tour (1817) and Rambles in Germany and Italy, 1840, 1842, and 1843 (1844). Her two fantastic novels, Frankenstein (1818) and The Last Man (1826), are also, notably, “rambles”, books in which the main characters are compelled to travel across “real-life” landscapes - but only to become, as in the last line of Frankenstein, “lost in darkness and distance”. The fantastic unsettles the familiar and both novels end with her characters “rambling off”, lost in the fantastic. Shelley maps the fantastic to the world in order to unfold new perceptions of the world itself. The fantastic appears not simply as an antithesis to realist fiction, unmoored from reality, but as a recognition of our untranslatable experience of the world. The radical dislocation in time and distance described by the fabulous and science fictional conceit of the Last Man’s introduction is balanced by the specificity of the geographical movement in the novel itself across a recognizable but increasingly barren landscape, emptying of meaning as of people. Using digital tools, “Rambles in the Fantastic” maps the geographical movements of Shelley’s novel over its future history, revealing how she destabilizes reality in order to better understand the experience of reality - claiming the fantastic as a way to make visible the meaning of the world as present but unknowable, spectral, shot through with the imagination as a necessary tool for apprehending the incomprehensible.
