Upload
ivan-johnson
View
74
Download
0
Tags:
Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
Literary family: daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft (early feminist)
Informal education (Well-read, grew up around Coleridge, Lamb, Percy Shelley)
1812: Met Percy Bysshe Shelley at age 15; he was married; they travelled together & had a child (scandalous!)
Summer of 1816: Percy Shelley and Mary met up with Lord Byron and John William Poldiori at Lake Geneva, Switzerland
Byron proposed ghost story contest Frankenstein; Mary was only 19 years old!
Dec. 30, 1816: Mary and Percy are married after his wife Harriet dies
1822: Percy drowns in boating accident
1818: Frankenstein published anonymously
1831: Second edition; Mary Shelley’s name appears on it
Many believed that Percy Shelley wrote it
Framed narrative Misconception:
Monster=Frankenstein Victor Frankenstein =
Doctor who creates the monster
Frontispiece of 1831 edition
Edmund Burke, “A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful” (1756)
An experience that produces both horror and pleasure
Inspires both fear and awe Vast, infinite spaces (the
starry night sky, the ocean) Sublime landscapes: wild
& untamed, not pastoral