The Monstrous Cosmos of Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein

In her 2019 novel Frankissstein: A Love Story, Jeanette Winterson weaves an intricate transtemporal and trans-spatial multiplicity, the coding of which is governed by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Through the double first-person narrative of Mary Shelley and her 21st-century reincarnation, Ry Shelley, Winterson approaches the literary phenomenon of Frankenstein in its entirety, seamlessly traversing and fusing the levels of the novel’s production, thematic and formal structuring, and reception. This paper argues that by employing the patchwork nature of Shelley’s monster as the principal metaphor for the creation of her own textual hybrid, Winterson upgrades the essentially Cartesian device of metafictional referencing into a bona fide world-building device that functions according to the governing principles of the post-Cartesian, i.e., postmodern, ontological order.

Valores y motivaciones que guían la práctica científica en Frankenstein

La novela Frankenstein o El moderno Prometeo (1818) es una fuente de información abundante sobre la imagen de la ciencia en la sociedad de principios del siglo XIX que permite revelar aspectos nítidos de la dimensión social de la investigación científica de la época. El propósito de este trabajo es, tras contextualizar algunos elementos clave del entorno científico coetáneo a la obra y la educación que recibió Mary Shelley —su autora—, realizar un análisis exhaustivo del texto original para revelar características de la práctica científica del momento, en particular los valores y motivaciones que guían el ejercicio de la ciencia en la narración. El análisis revela que: (1) los valores que caracterizan la práctica científica en el universo Frankenstein son: rigor; altruismo; empeño y perseverancia; determinación; valentía; imaginación; serenidad; reconocimiento; y responsabilidad; mientras que (2) las motivaciones para emprender la actividad científica son: curiosidad e interés; pasión o entusiasmo; ambición; y voluntad. La caracterización de la labor científica a partir de la obra exhibe una conceptualización de lo que se considera buena ciencia que parece vigente en el imaginario de la ciencia actual.

Caleb Williams, o l’umamanità divisa: letteratura e politica in William Godwin

Storico dai molteplici interessi, bibliotecario, musicista, uomo di cultura e grande modernista, studioso, in particolare, dell’Italia settecentesca, Calogero Farinella ci ha prematuramente lasciati nel giugno del 2019, a poco più di sessanta anni. Le sue pubblicazioni sulla Genova del Settecento e sulla scienza illuminista (veronese specialmente: Francesco Bianchini, Anton Mario Lorgna e l’Accademia dei Quaranta) fanno e faranno sempre data negli studi di storia della cultura. Allievo tra i più brillanti di Salvatore Rotta (1926-2001), dal quale mutuò la passione per il XVIII secolo in particolare, Farinella si laureò sotto la sua guida su William Godwin (1756-1836), padre di Mary Shelley, filosofo e scrittore politico di area libertaria, che, con la sua fondamentale opera, marchia a fuoco il passaggio, in Gran Bretagna, dai Lumi al Romanticismo. Sulla figura e gli scritti di Godwin, ricavandoli dalla propria dissertazione di laurea, Farinella estrasse e pubblicò, negli anni Ottanta del secolo scorso, due articoli, apparsi nel volume della «Miscellanea storica ligure» contenente gli Studi in onore di Francesco Cataluccio (William Godwin ed il suo Journal all’epoca della Rivoluzione Francese, xv, 1984), e poi su Studi settecenteschi (Il governo più semplice. Il mito democratico-repubblicano in William Godwin, viii, 1987). Un terzo ampio articolo, che contiene spunti davvero interessanti sul romanzo utopistico di Godwin, rimase inedito, sino a oggi, malgrado l’oggettivo e rilevante valore del contributo di Farinella. Crediamo, pertanto, di fare cosa gradita alla memoria dell’amico e dello studioso pubblicandolo per la prima volta, in questa sede.

Mary Shelley e a Sibila de Cumas molduras proféticas no romance The Last Man (1826)

No ano de 1826 a escritora inglesa Mary Shelley publica o romance apocalíptico The Last Man, contando a história de como a humanidade fora dissipada por uma peste em 2100, restando apenas um sobrevivente que, imune à pandemia, resolve deixar registrado em forma de diário, a história do fim do mundo como ele o conhecia. Ao apresentar o relato que levou à escritura da narrativa, Mary Shelley nos coloca em contato com o mito da Sibila de Cumas, revelando ter encontrado o manuscrito que indicava os fatos que ela narrou em seu romance. Este artigo visa discutir a importância do texto introdutório do romance, considerando as molduras estabelecidas entre o mito da Sibila e as capacidades criadoras de Shelley.

Dead is not better: The multiple resurrections of Stephen King’s Revival

Stephen King’s 2014 novel, Revival, plays with its title in several respects. It is first a familiar Frankenstein-esque narrative about a mad scientist who seeks to revive the dead. It is also, however, about religious revivals, both in the specific sense of the religious gatherings held by minister and main antagonist Charles Jacobs, and in the more general sense of attempting to find something in which to place one’s faith in a world where accidents can claim the lives of loved ones. Beyond this, Revival plays with its title in two more senses. First, it elaborates on the recurring theme in King of existentialist angst precipitated by the death of a child or loved one, which King uses to question God’s benevolence or existence. In order to ask these questions, King also resurrects the spirit of Mary Shelley, taking from Frankenstein the theme of reanimation of the dead. The narrative’s conclusion, however, offers yet another revival as it transitions us from the horror of Shelley to the weird fiction of Arthur Machen and H. P. Lovecraft. Thus, through these various revivals, King’s novel charts the evolution of twentieth- and twenty-first-century horror from Shelley to Lovecraft and our contemporary ‘weird’ moment.

Dr. Frankestein and the Birth of Horror

In the spring of 1818, a novel was published in England, which became the starting point of a new literary genre. The name of the discovered type of literature is sci-fi horror. The creator of sci-fi horror – Mary Shelley – was at that time only 21 years old. Even the title of the novel became today the common noun is “Frankenstein, or Modern Prometheus”. “Archetype of horror”– this is how literary critics say about this work. The article attempts to prove and show that the entire plot of the novel is based on discoveries made at that time in the science of electrical phenomena. The article also tells about experiments with electricity, conducted by scientists in the 18th – early 19th centuries, and their perception by contemporaries. Thewhole structure, narrative of the novel, its rhetoric and even expressive artistic means are all works on the idea of bringing the natural-scientific basis under the absolutely seemingly fantastic plan. But, moreover, the novel can be viewed as a work of genius, foreseeing the emergence of what will be called molecular biology and genetic engineering.

Epidemic as Metaphor: the Allegorical Significance of Epidemic Accounts in Literature

"Epidemic as Metaphor: The Allegorical Significance of Epidemic Accounts in Literature. Our paper searches for those common elements in selected literary representations of the plagues that have affected humanity. As a theoretical framework for our research, we have considered the contributions of Peta Michell, who equals pandemic with contagion and sees it as a metaphor; Susan Sontag views illness as a punishment or a sign, the subject of a metaphorization. Christa Jansohn sees the pest as a metaphor for an extreme form of collective calamity. For René Girard, the medical plague is a metaphor for the social plague, and Gilles Deleuze thinks that fabulation is a “health enterprise.” From the vast library of the pandemic, we have selected examples from Antiquity to the 19th century: Thucydides, Lucretius, Boccaccio, Daniel Defoe, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Jack London. For Camus, the plague is an allegory of evil, oppression and war. Our paper explores the lessons learned from these texts, irrespective of their degree of factuality or fictionality, pointing out how the plague is used metaphorically and allegorically to reveal a more profound truth about different societies and humanity. Keywords: epidemic, plague, The Decameron (Boccaccio), A Journal of the Plague Year (Daniel Defoe), King Pest (Edgar Allan Poe), The Last Man (Mary Shelley), The Nature of Things (Lucretius), The Plague (Albert Camus), The Scarlet Plague (Jack London), The War of the Peloponnesians (Thucydides) "