The Creation of the Monster

1. Edison's Frankenstein

2. James Whale's Frankenstein

3. The Rocky Horror Picture Show

 
4. Igor

Other interesting things to watch

Bride of Frankenstein

Young Frankenstein

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Frankenweenie

Penny Dreadful

Frankenstein, M. D.

Mary Shelley (1797-1851)

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, later known as Mary Shelley, was born in Somers Town, London, England, on the 30th of August 1797. She was the daughter of William Godwin, a journalist, philosopher and novelist, and Mary Wollstonecraft, educator and feminist philosopher.
Mary Shelley's most famous novel, Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus, was released anonymously when she was only 21 years old. Only from its second edition, five years later, was her name to appear as the author. The central idea came to Shelly in a dream where she saw a student putting together parts of a man's body and working through a big engine to animate it. She first wrote a short story but Percy encouraged her to expand it into a novel. The novel had at the center of its plot a failed attempt at artificial life, by the scientist Frankenstein, which produced a monster. The work is considered to be a mixture of science fiction, gothic novel, and having elements from the Romantic movement.
During the last 20 years of her life, Mary Shelley was very busy editing and writing. She contributed frequently to ladies' magazines and after her father's death she planned to write his memoirs but ended up giving up on it. From 1939 Shelley's health started to decline, preventing her from work and she died most likely of a brain tumor on the 1st of February 1851. [1]

• Biography

• Poetry Foundation

• Mary Shelley's works

• Percy Shelley's review on Frankenstein

John Keats (1795-1821)

John Keats' Facebook

An Ode to Keats Tumblr

Percy Shelley (1792-1822)

Ozymandias

BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Source: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/238972#poem

To hear the poem, click here.

To read Prometheus Unbound, click here.

More on "Kubla Khan" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

"Kubla Khan" by Samuel T. Coleridge

• To read the lyrics of Rush's song based on "Kubla Khan", click here.

• To read the ballad "The Demon Lover", click here.

• To read the story "The Demon Lover" by Elizabeth Bowen, click here.

• To read the novel Doña Flor y sus dos maridos by Jorge Amado, click here.

• To read about the Pombero, click here.

• To read about the Peixe Boto, click here.

"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel T. Coleridge

On Wordsworth, Coleridge, "Kubla Khan" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

• The Lyrical Ballads

Click here to download the book.

Click here to read the preface to the second edition.

• Biographia Literaria

Click here to download the book.

• Automatic poetry

Click here, here and here to read more about automatic poetry,

Click here to access an automatic poetry generator.

• "Kubla Khan"

Click here to read the preface to the poem.

Click here to read the ballad "The Demon Lover".

Click here to read Elizabeth Bowen's story "The Demon Lover".

Click here to download The Travels of Marco Polo.

Click here to read Purchas Pilgrimage.

• "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

Click here to see the illustration on the poem by Gustave Doré.

Click here for more on Gustave Doré.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, (born October 21, 1772, Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, England—died July 25, 1834, Highgate, near London), English lyrical poet, critic, and philosopher. His Lyrical Ballads, written with William Wordsworth, heralded the English Romantic movement, and his Biographia Literaria (1817) is the most significant work of general literary criticism produced in the English Romantic period.1

• Poets.org

• The Poetry Foundation

• Encyclopaedia Britannica

• Coleridge's works

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

Born in England in 1770, poet William Wordsworth worked with Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Lyrical Ballads (1798). The collection, which contained Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," introduced Romanticism to English poetry. Wordsworth also showed his affinity for nature with the famous poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud." He became England's poet laureate in 1843, a role he held until his death in 1850. 1

• Poets.org

• The Poetry Foundation

• BBC

• Wordsworth Trust

• William Wordsworth's works

• Project Gutenberg

• Dorothy Wordsworth's journals

William Blake (1757-1827)

William Blake was born at Broad Street, Soho, in 1757, the third son (and second surviving) of James Blake, haberdasher and hosier, and his wife Catherine.

As a boy he attended Henry Pars’ drawing school near the Strand, and was later apprenticed to the engraver James Basire, for whom, among other projects, Blake made drawings and engravings of the monuments of Westminster Abbey.

He continued to work as an engraver throughout his life alongside his prophetic books and paintings. 

Blake married Catherine Boucher in 1782. Blake lived almost all his life in London, apart from three years’ slumber by the sea at Felpham in Sussex in the years 1800-1803. He died in 1827, and is buried at Bunhill Fields.1

• The Poetry Foundation

• The William Blake Archive

• The William Blake Society

• William Blake's works

• Project Gutenberg

Neo-classicism & Romanticism

• "The Rape of the Lock" by Alexander Pope (Neo-classicism)

Canto I
Canto II
Canto III
Canto IV
Canto V

For more on Alexander Pope, click here.

• "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Thomas Grey (Transitional: Gothic elements)

To read the poem, click here.

For more on Thomas Grey, click here.

• "Ode to a Grecian Urn" by John Keats (Romantic with Neo-classicist elements)

To read the poem, click here.

For more on John Keats, click here.

• "A Red, Red Rose" by Robert Burns (Romanticism)

To read the poem, click here.

For more on Robert Burns, click here.

Introduction to the Syllabus: Pendular Movement

Wuthering Heights: Jacobs

Presentation on Jacobs

Key terms:

-Gender roles (gender theory)

-Dometic violence

-Patriarchal society: asserting power

-Distortion (ridicule) of male characters

-Power/discipline: justification of violence

Wuthering Heights: Eagleton

Presentation on Eagleton

Key terms:

-Binary oppositions

-Class: relationships of power

-Marxist criticism

Wuthering Heights: Matthews

Presentation on Matthews

Key terms:

-Frames

-Unreliable narrator

-Sinking frame (forgetting about the frame)

-Boundaries

-Frame merges with the story

Wuthering Heights: Makovski

Presentation on Makovski

Key terms:

-Dialogism

-Interpretation

-Misinterpretation

-The Mirror Stage

Wuthering Heights: Kermode

Presentation on Kermode

Key terms:

-Classic

-Ambiguity

-Openness

-Plurality of Interpretation

-Time

-Reader Response Theory

Wuthering Heights: Van Ghent

Presentation on Van Ghent

Key terms:

-Window Symbol

-"Two Children" Figure

-Binary opposition

-Outside of Ethics

-Human vs. Inhuman

-Incest

Wuthering Heights II

Comic on Wuthering Heights

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3


Comic on the Brontë sisters


To read about the author, click here.

To read more of her works, click here.

Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights 

"Wuthering Heights" by Kate Bush (white dress version)



"Wuthering Heights" by Kate Bush (red dress version)



Parody of "Wuthering Heights" (Noel Fielding)



Cover of "Wuthering Heights" by Angra

The Creation of the Monster

1. Edison's Frankenstein

2. James Whale's Frankenstein

3. The Rocky Horror Picture Show

4. Igor