The narrative structure of "Frankenstein". The Modern Prometheus and its effect
The narrative structure of

Author: Dorothea Wolschak

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2014-07-04

Total Pages: 22

ISBN-13: 3656689660

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Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, Catholic University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, language: English, abstract: The Gothic novel "Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus" is the result of Mary Shelley's travels to Geneva, Switzerland, with her future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Dr. John Polidori and Lord Byron, themselves famous authors, and an entertaining contest between those friends about who could write the best horror story. Conceived of a nightmare after reading German ghost stories by the fire and conversing about Darwinism, occult ideas, galvanism and science, the only nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley put this piece of art down on paper and published it anonymously in 1818. Frankenstein is a novel with a complex narrative structure. In the core of the novel the Creature's story is presented to us framed by Victor Frankenstein's story which itself is enframed by Robert Walton's epistolary narrative. The overall structure of the novel is symmetrical: it begins with the letters of Walton, shifts to Victor's tale, then to the Creature's narration, so as to switch to Victor again and end with the records of Walton. In this manner the reader gets different versions of the same story from different perspectives. Mary Shelley's rather atypical approach not to stick to only one narrator and one defined narrative situation throughout the book creates various impressions on the reader of the novel. The narrative situation of a text describes the structure of how the content, plot, characters and events are being mediated to the reader and is often referred to as the point of view. The narrative situation is one of the main categories in literary analysis. One of the most important academics who concerned himself with the systematisation of narrative structures since the 1950s is the Austrian literary theorist Dr. Franz Karl Stanzel (*1923). There is strong competition by the typology of Gérard Genette since the 1990s, however, Stanzel's theory is being taught to date, which is why it is used in the following analysis of the narrative structure in Frankenstein and its effect on the reader.

Frankenstein
Frankenstein

Author: Shelley

Publisher:

Published: 2023-01-11

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789356845138

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Frankenstein is a novel by Mary Shelley. It was first published in 1818. Ever since its publication, the story of Frankenstein has remained brightly in the imagination of the readers and literary circles across the countries. In the novel, an English explorer in the Arctic, who assists Victor Frankenstein on the final leg of his chase, tells the story. As a talented young medical student, Frankenstein strikes upon the secret of endowing life to the dead. He becomes obsessed with the idea that he might make a man. The Outcome is a miserable and an outcast who seeks murderous revenge for his condition. Frankenstein pursues him when the creature flees. It is at this juncture t that Frankenstein meets the explorer and recounts his story, dying soon after. Although it has been adapted into films numerous times, they failed to effectively convey the stark horror and philosophical vision of the novel. Shelley's novel is a combination of Gothic horror story and science fiction.

The Endurance of Frankenstein
The Endurance of Frankenstein

Author: George Levine

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1982-05-19

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 9780520046405

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MARY SHELLEY's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus grew out of a parlor game and a nightmare vision. The story of the book's origin is a famous one, first told in the introduction Mary Shelley wrote for the 1831 edition of the novel. The two Shelleys, Byron, Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, and John William Polidori (Byron's physician) spent a "wet, ungenial summer in the Swiss Alps." Byron suggested that "each write a ghost story." If one is to trust Mary Shelley's account (and James Rieger has shown the untrustworthiness of its chronology and particulars), only she and "poor Polidori" took the contest seriously. The two "illustrious poets," according to her, "annoyed by the platitude of prose, speedily relinquished their uncongenial task." Polidori, too, is made to seem careless, unable to handle his story of a "skull-headed lady." Though Mary Shelley is just as deprecating when she speaks of her own "tiresome unlucky ghost story," she also suggests that its sources went deeper. Her truant muse became active as soon as she fastened on the "idea" of "making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream": "'I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others."' The twelve essays in this collection attest to the endurance of Mary Shelley's "waking dream." Appropriately, though less romantically, this book also grew out of a playful conversation at a party. When several of the contributors to this book discovered that they were all closet aficionados of Mary Shelley's novel, they decided that a book might be written in which each contributor-contestant might try to account for the persistent hold that Frankenstein continues to exercise on the popular imagination. Within a few months, two films--Warhol's Frankenstein and Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein--and the Hall-Landau and Isherwood-Bachardy television versions of the novel appeared to remind us of our blunted purpose. These manifestations were an auspicious sign and resulted in the book Endurance of Frankenstein.

The Workshop of Filthy Creation
The Workshop of Filthy Creation

Author: Richard Gadz

Publisher:

Published: 2021-10-25

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 9781838498733

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"The Workshop of Filthy Creation is a remarkable book, visceral and philosophical in equal measure. The perfect combination of big ideas and a rattling good yarn. Hell of a read." - James Kinsley, author of Playtime's Over In the autumn of 1879, an intelligent, artificially-created being-outwardly a young woman called Maria-arrives in London under the protection of biologist Professor George Hobson. Hobson gathers a few close friends and reveals her existence, explaining that she is the final result of a research programme undertaken by a dynasty of unethical scientists, the von Frakkens-all now dead. Unknown to Hobson, one of his friends, Jabez Pell, is linked to an underground scientific organisation, the Promethean Society. Set up in the early 1800s, its aim is to conquer death by whatever means possible. Pell immediately recognises the potential that Maria's regenerative abilities can offer to the Prometheans - but after his attempt to kidnap her turns deadly, Maria goes on the run. Maria finds herself at the heart of raging controversy: some want her jailed, some want her dead, and some want to peel the flesh from her bones. Worse, she is now hunted not only by members of the Prometheans but also by the police-and her creator Wilhelm von Frakken, who, as it turns out, is alive (in a sense). Thrilling and evocative, fantastical and grotesque, The Workshop of Filthy Creation uses a Frankenstein-ian thread to stitch together elements of real scientific history with the darkest parts of Victorian London and speculation on the nature of human life.

Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus
Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus

Author: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Publisher: Wordsworth Editions

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9781853260230

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Frankenstein is a deeply disturbing story of a monstrous creation, which has terrified and chilled readers since its first publication in 1818.

Playing God?
Playing God?

Author: Ted Peters

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-04-04

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 1136724281

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Since the original publication of Playing God? in 1996, three developments in genetic technology have moved to the center of the public conversation about the ethics of human bioengineering. Cloning, the completion of the human genome project, and, most recently, the controversy over stem cell research have all sparked lively debates among religious thinkers and the makers of public policy. In this updated edition, Ted Peters illuminates the key issues in these debates and continues to make deft connections between our questions about God and our efforts to manage technological innovations with wisdom.

Gris Grimly's Frankenstein
Gris Grimly's Frankenstein

Author: Mary Shelley

Publisher: Balzer + Bray

Published: 2013-08-27

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 9780061862977

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Retells, in graphic novel format, Mary Shelley's classic tale of a monster, assembled by a scientist from parts of dead bodies, who develops a mind of his own as he learns to loathe himself and hate his creator.

Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus
Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus

Author: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13:

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"In the summer of 1816, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, then eighteen years old, began to write the novel Frankenstein after she and her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley took part in a ghost-story competition at Lord Byron's villa by Lake Geneva. Over the next nine months - a period which saw their return to England in autumn 1816 and subsequent marriage - she (with Percy) drafted the entire novel in a form materially different from the two standard editions of 1818 and 1831, which were based on a later fair copy." "Until now, no one has been able to read what Mary Shelley herself initially wrote in this original draft of the novel. Going back to the unique draft manuscript of the text held in the Bodleian Library, Charles E. Robinson has teased out Percy Shelley's amendments, isolating them from the story in Mary Shelley's hand. Both texts - with and without Percy's interventions - are presented in this edition, allowing us for the first time to read the story in Mary's original hand and also to see how Percy edited his wife's prose."--BOOK JACKET.

Frankenstein Or the Modern Prometheus (the Revised 1831 Edition - Wisehouse Classics) (Revised 1831)
Frankenstein Or the Modern Prometheus (the Revised 1831 Edition - Wisehouse Classics) (Revised 1831)

Author: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Publisher:

Published: 2017-09-20

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 9789176374191

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This is the Revised 1831 Edition of FRANKENSTEIN; OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS, a novel written by the English author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley about the young science student Victor Frankenstein, who creates a grotesque but sentient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment. Shelley started writing the story when she was eighteen, and the novel was published when she was twenty. The first edition was published anonymously in London in 1818. Shelley's name appears on the second edition, published in France in 1823. Shelley had travelled through Europe in 1814, journeying along the river Rhine in Germany with a stop in Gernsheim which is just 17 km away from Frankenstein Castle, where, two centuries before, an alchemist was engaged in experiments. Later, she travelled in the region of Geneva (Switzerland)-where much of the story takes place-and the topic of galvanism and other similar occult ideas were themes of conversation among her companions, particularly her lover and future husband, Percy Shelley. Mary, Percy, Lord Byron, and John Polidori decided to have a competition to see who could write the best horror story. After thinking for days, Shelley dreamt about a scientist who created life and was horrified by what he had made; her dream later evolved into the novel's story. Shelley completed her writing in May 1817, and Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was first published on 11 March 1818 by the small London publishing house of Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones. The second edition of Frankenstein was published on 11 August 1822 in two volumes (by G. and W. B. Whittaker) following the success of the stage play Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein by Richard Brinsley Peake; this edition credited Mary Shelley as the author. On 31 October 1831, the first "popular" edition in one volume appeared, published by Henry Colburn & Richard Bentley. This edition was heavily revised by Mary Shelley, partially because of pressure to make the story more conservative, and included a new, longer preface by her, presenting a somewhat embellished version of the genesis of the story. This edition tends to be the one most widely read now, although editions containing the original 1818 text are still published. Many scholars prefer the 1818 text, arguing that it preserves the spirit of Shelley's original publication.