Introduction to Frankenstein (1831)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Shelley
Keyword(s):  
Original Work ◽  
Mary Shelley ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Young Girl ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
Central Image

In her introduction to the 1831 “Standard Novels” edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley accedes to the ongoing requests that she explain how she “then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?” After describing a bit about her childhood, Mary then describes the gathering of her, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their friends in the cold, wet summer of 1816 and the challenge issued by Lord Byron to “each write a ghost story.” After suffering from “that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship,” Mary finally conceives of the central image of the revivification of the creature and its abandonment by his creator. Mary also describes the contributions that Percy made to the original work and describes as merely stylistic the alterations she made between the original and the 1831 edition.

Madness Writing Poetry/ Poetry Writing Madness

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
John Keats ◽  
William Blake ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
The Public ◽  
John Clare ◽  
Romantic Poetry

The final chapter returns to the scene of Romantic poetry, looking at poetry by William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Clare. It reads these Romantic texts as poised articulations of the idea of poetic madness, and discusses generally how these writers contributed to, or interwove with their own lives and works, new and rediscovered mythologies of madness, sometimes anticipating or resisting the public images created by journalism, criticism, or biography, previously described. Finally, the Romantic mad poet is considered in relation to criticism and the canonical role of Romanticism in English literature.

Textual Seductions: Women's Reading and Writing in Margaret Oliphant's “The Library Window”

1997 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamar Heller
Keyword(s):  
Young Girl ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Women's Reading ◽  
College Library

Margaret oliphants ghost story “The Library Window” (1896) — one of the last works of its author's prolific career — is haunted by images of reading and writing. Visiting her aunt, the young narrator (never named) reads obsessively, perched in the window seat where she witnesses another scene of textuality. Some claim that a window in the college library across the street is only “fictitious panes marked on the wall” (296), yet in a series of increasingly vivid tableaux the girl sees through those panes a young man seated in a study “writing, writing always” (305). So entranced is she by this vision of scholarship, so convinced of its reality, that she is devastated to learn the window is indeed a fake and the young man a ghost who appears to her because of a curse on the female members of her family: he was killed by the brothers of another young girl — the narrator's ancestor — when they mistakenly assumed he was responding to her flirtatious overtures as she waved to him across the street.

scholarly journals Summit or Appendix? “Mont Blanc” and Mont Blanc in History of a Six Weeks’ Tour by Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1817)

Viatica ◽  
2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne ROUHETTE ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Mary Shelley ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
Travel Narrative ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
History Of

"Mont Blanc", a poem written by Percy Shelley, published in 1817 in a travel account entitled History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (written with Mary Shelley) has sparked debate. Indeed, some critics consider, from a teleological perspective, that the prosaic part of the story was revised to prepare the reader for the sublime of the poem; while for others, the poem is merely an appendix to a composite work. Several arguments may support each of the two hypotheses; yet, in any case, it would seem that the travel narrative is more fictional than referential.

Poetry on the Porch

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Zeitlin
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Sand Dunes ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Living Room ◽  
Equal Weight ◽  
Garden City ◽  
The Family

In this chapter, the author recalls how his family would spend afternoons and evenings reading poems on the screened porch overlooking the sand dunes, the beach, and the sea in a rented house in Garden City, South Carolina. His father-in-law, Lucas, eagerly anticipates those times, bringing along his 101 Favorite Poems, published in 1929. But they all bring a few poems to the porch—even the children. At age ten their nephew Aidan Powers came equipped with a full set of Shel Silverstein's ingenious poetry. Masterpieces and ditties are treated with equal weight: poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, William Wordsworth, and Lord Byron are interspersed with children's poetry and nonsense verses. The evenings of poetry reading on the porch at the beach were so enjoyed by the family that they spawned poetry nights in the Dargan living room back in Darlington, South Carolina, on a weekly basis.

scholarly journals Mary Who Wrote Frankenstein by L. Bailey

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Quirk
Keyword(s):  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Read Aloud ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Older Children ◽  
Summer Vacation ◽  
Special Collections ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Right ◽  
Friendly Competition

Bailey, Linda. Mary Who Wrote Frankenstein. Illustrated by Júlia Sardà. Tundra Books, 2018.   The subject of this book is the story-behind-the-story of Dr Frankenstein and his terrible creature. It is the story of how an 18-year-old girl came to write one of the best-known novels of all time, inspired by a friendly competition among a group of friends that included two of the most famous authors of the age (Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron). While on summer vacation in 1816, staying at Villa Diodati (a mansion on the shores of Lake Geneva), a dark and stormy night offered the ideal setting for Lord Byron to read aloud from a book of ghoulish stories called Fantasmagoriana and inspired him to propose a friendly competition in which each member of the assembled party would write a ghost story. Although it would take her almost a year to complete the novel, this competition was the beginning of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In a preface to the third edition, written many years later, the author describes these events to explain how a young girl “came to think of and to dilate upon so very hideous an idea.” Inspired by Mary Shelley’s preface, Linda Bailey has reimagined this well-known history in a way that is very relatable for young readers. Bailey explores some of the formative moments in Mary’s childhood—in particular, the death of her mother when she was only 11 days old—and some of recent scientific discoveries that were challenging old ideas, all to explain how Mary could imagine a creature “made of dead body parts, stretched out—and coming to life.” While not at all suitable for very young or very sensitive readers, this story will be inspiring for some. Perhaps the best part of the book, the gorgeously stylized illustrations by Júlia Sardà are powerfully evocative. Like the text, the illustrations are darkly appropriate reflections of Mary’s story without being overly gruesome. This is a wonderful book for the right reader. Tundra is marketing this book as being suitable for children aged 5-8, but the subject matter will be too dark for many in this age group. Somewhat older children may be better equipped to deal with the difficult elements of the story and they may be interested in the research notes at the back of the book.  Highly recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Linda Quirk Linda taught courses in Canadian Literature, Women's Writing, and Children's Literature at Queen's University (Kingston) and at Seneca College (Toronto) before moving to Edmonton to become a librarian at University of Alberta’s Bruce Peel Special Collections.

Romantic Prayer

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Stokes
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Percy Bysshe Shelley ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Lord Byron ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
William Cowper ◽  
Anna Letitia Barbauld ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Aesthetic Distance

Whilst religion and the secular have been continually debated contexts for literature of the Romantic era, the dominant scholarly focus has always been on doctrines and denominations. In analysing the motif of devotion, this book shifts attention to the quintessential articulation of religion as lived experience, as practice, and as a performative rather than descriptive phenomenon. In an era when the tenability and rationality of prayer were much contested, poetry—a form with its own interlinked history with prayer, especially via lyric—was a unique place to register what prayer meant in modernity. This study illustrates how the discourse of prayer continually intervened in the way that poetic practices evolved and responded to the religious and secular questions of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century moment. After laying out the details of prayer’s historical position in the Romantic era across a spread of religious traditions, it turns to a range of writers, from the identifiably religious to the staunchly sceptical. William Cowper and Anna Letitia Barbauld are shown to use poetry to reflect and reinvent the ideals of prayer inherited from their own Dissenting denominational histories. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s work is analysed as part of a long engagement with the rationality of prayer in modernity, culminating in an explicit ‘philosophy’ of prayer; William Wordsworth—by contrast—keeps prayer at an aesthetic distance, continually alluding to prayerful language but rarely committing to a devotional voice itself. John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron are treated in the context of departing from Christianity, under the influence of Enlightenment, materialist and atheist critique—what happens to prayer in poetry when prayer as a language is becoming impossible to maintain?

“Prey to some cureless disquiet”: Polidori’s Queer Vampyre at the Margins of Romanticism

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mair Rigby
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Interest ◽  
Mary Shelley ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Male Bonding ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
Sexual Discourse ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
The Way ◽  
Gothic Studies

Abstract Dr. John Polidori’s appropriative rewriting of Lord Byron’s unfinished “Fragment” as The Vampyre has long been of interest to the field of Gothic studies for its representation of the first coherent vampire in English Literature. In recent years, the inscription of sexual rhetoric in both texts has attracted further critical attention. Featuring men who traverse the explosively tense line between compulsory homosocial relations and the culturally prohibited horrors of homoerotic desire, these texts can certainly be read in the light of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s identification of the homophobic “paranoid gothic.” However, considered together, The Vampyre and the “Fragment” reveal more than anxieties about male bonding. In this essay, I explore the nexus of concerns raised by The Vampyre, its relation to the “Fragment,” and the perceived relationship between Polidori and Byron with the aim of working towards a repositioning of these marginal Gothic works as indeed both disquieting and deeply queer. The “Fragment” represents Byron’s contribution to the now mythical “ghost story competition” at Villa Diodati in 1816 which also inspired the writing of Frankenstein. The man Mary Shelley dubbed “Poor Polidori” stands on the margins of this famous gathering, but he and his story remain a haunting presence in more than one respect. Focussing upon the way in which modern sexual discourse has helped make the author into an object of sexual interest, I propose that the production of Polidori as a strange, sexually suspect figure strikingly illustrates how the Gothic rhetoric of the sexual “unspeakable” can reverberate out from the text and into our thinking about the author.

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