Frankenstein

Place on List:

II. Literary Genre: The Novel

4. How do elements of irony work in the novel?

Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. (1818, United Kingdom)

Key Terms (tags): novel, irony, gothic, english literature, epistolary

Supporting References:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein

2. http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/frankenstein/
3. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/84
4. summary of modern criticism: http://www.victorianweb.org/previctorian/mshelley/pva229.html
5. http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2012/nov/26/mary-shelley-frankenstein-preface-1831-archive
6. Bio: http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/shelleybio.html
7. https://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hist257s02/students/Becky/prometheus.html
8. http://www.litgothic.com/Authors/mshelley.html
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10. Birch, Dinah. "Frankenstein." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 29 Aug. 2013 .

“Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. A Gothic tale of terror by Mary *Shelley, published 1818. In her preface she records that she, P. B. *Shelley, and Lord *Byron had spent the wet summer of 1816 in Switzerland reading German ghost stories; all three agreed to write tales of the supernatural, of which hers was the only one to be completed. She also records that the original concept came to her in a half‐waking nightmare.

“Technically an epistolary novel, told through the letters of Walton, an English explorer in the Arctic, the tale relates the exploits of Frankenstein, an idealistic Genevan student of natural philosophy, who discovers at the University of Ingolstadt the secret of imparting life to inanimate matter. Collecting bones from charnel‐houses, he constructs the semblance of a human being and gives it life. The creature, endowed with supernatural strength and size and terrible in appearance, inspires loathing in whoever sees it. Lonely and miserable (and educated in human emotion by studies of Goethe, Plutarch, and Paradise Lost), it turns upon its creator, and, failing to persuade him to provide a female counterpart, eventually murders his brother, his friend Clerval, and his bride Elizabeth. Frankenstein pursues it to the Arctic to destroy it, but dies in the pursuit, after relating his story to Walton. The monster declares that Frankenstein will be its last victim, and disappears to end its own life. This tale inspired many film versions, and has been regarded as the origin of modern science fiction, though it is also a version of the myth of the noble savage, portraying a nature essentially good corrupted by ill treatment. It is also remarkable for its description of nature, which owes much to the Shelleys' admiration for Wordsworth, Coleridge, and in particular The Rime of the *Ancient Mariner. The novel has been interpreted as a warning about human presumption, as a prophecy of the ramifications of unfettered scientific enquiry, and as a critique of the solipsism of (male) Romanticism. The book is sometimes read, controversially, in personal terms of Shelley's troubled experience of motherhood, even as a veiled attack on her husband as an inadequate parent.”

11. Birch, Dinah. "Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. : Oxford University Press, 2009. Oxford Reference. 2009. Date Accessed 16 Aug. 2013 .

The article offers an overview of Shelley and less a discussion on the above-cited text.

“Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (1797–1851) Novelist, editor, biographer and travel writer, only daughter of William *Godwin and Mary *Wollstonecraft, born in London. Her mother died a few days after her birth. Educated in London, in 1814 she eloped to Italy with P. B. *Shelley, and married him in 1816 on the death of his wife Harriet. Only one of their children, Percy, survived infancy. She returned to England in 1823, after Shelley's death the previous year, and pursued a professional writing career. She is famous for Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818), but she is the author also of six further novels. Valperga (1823) is a romance set in 14th‐century Italy; The *Last Man (1826), a novel set in the future. Perkin Warbeck (1830), a historical romance bearing the influence of Walter *Scott, addresses the historically contentious theory that the duke of York (the younger of the two princes imprisoned in the tower and allegedly put to death by Richard III) was the same person as the rebel leader Perkin Warbeck. There followed Lodore (1835) which returns to the theme of primitivism evident in Frankenstein and The Last Man; the heroine, Ethel, is taken as a child by her father, Lord Lodore, to the wilds of Illinois and reared amidst the grandest objects of nature, whence she returns to a life of romance and penury in a London reminiscent of Mary Shelley's early years. Her sixth and last novel Falkner (1837) was composed during the year of her father's death, an event that clearly influenced the novel's primary plot line, which concerns the father–daughter relationship between Falkner and his adopted charge, Elizabeth. She also published several biographies and short stories, most of which were published in the Keepsake; some have science fiction elements, others are Gothic (see Gothic fiction) or historical (see Historical Fiction), and many are continental in setting. Her Rambles in Germany and Italy, in 1840, 1842 and 1843 (1844) was well received. She also edited her husband's Poems (1839) and his Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments (1840). Her children's story Maurice, written in 1820, about a kidnapped boy's chance meeting with his father, was rediscovered in 1997 and published in 1998 with an introduction by Claire *Tomalin. See The Journals of Mary Shelley, ed. P. R. Feldman and D. Scott‐Kilvert, 2 vols (1987); The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. B. T. Bennett, 3 vols (1980–8); The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, ed. N. Crook and P. Clemit, 8 vols (1996).”