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.

Genealogy and Literature
Genealogy and Literature

Author: Lee Quinby

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0816625611

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Genealogy and Literature was first published in 1995. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Traditionalists insist that literature transcends culture. Others counter that it is subversive by nature. By challenging both claims, Genealogy and Literature reveals the importance of literature for understanding dominant and often violent power/knowledge relations within a given society. The authors explore the ways in which literature functions as a cultural practice, the links between death and literature as a field of discourse, and the possibilities of dismantling modes of bodily regulation. Through wide-ranging investigations of writing from England, France, Nigeria, Peru, Japan, and the United States, they reinvigorate the study of literature as a means of understanding the complexities of everyday experience. Contributors: Claudette Kemper Columbus, Lennard J. Davis, Simon During, Michel Foucault, Ellen J. Goldner, Tom Hayes, Kate Mehuron, Donald Mengay, Imafedia Okhamafe, Lee Quinby, José David Saldivar, Malini Johar Schueller. Lee Quinby is professor of English and American studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She is the author of Anti-Apocalypse: Exercises in Genealogical Criticism (Minnesota, 1994).

We Are All Monsters
We Are All Monsters

Author: Andrew Mangham

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2023-02-14

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 0262047527

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How the monsters of nineteenth-century literature and science came to define us. “Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?” In We Are All Monsters, Andrew Mangham offers a fresh interpretation of this question uttered by Frankenstein’s creature in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel in an expansive exploration of how nineteenth-century literature and science recast the monster as vital to the workings of nature and key to unlocking the knowledge of all life-forms and processes. Even as gothic literature and freak shows exploited an abiding association between abnormal bodies and horror, amazement, or failure, the development of monsters in the ideas and writings of this period showed the world to be dynamic, varied, plentiful, transformative, and creative. In works ranging from Comte de Buffon’s interrogations of humanity within natural history to Hugo de Vries’s mutation theory, and from Shelley’s artificial man to fin de siècle notions of body difference, Mangham expertly traces a persistent attempt to understand modern subjectivity through a range of biological and imaginary monsters. In a world that hides monstrosity behind theoretical and cultural representations that reinscribe its otherness, this enlightened book shows how innovative nineteenth-century thinkers dismantled the fictive idea of normality and provided a means of thinking about life in ways that check the reflexive tendency to categorize and divide.

Creature and Creator
Creature and Creator

Author: Paul A. Cantor

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1984-03-15

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9780521258319

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This vocabulary text helps beginning students gain knowledge of basic North American English vocabulary. This North American English edition of the popular English Vocabulary in Use series is appropriate for classroom use and for self-study reference and practice. An easy-to-use format presents a content or grammar-based area of vocabulary on the left-hand page and innovative practice activities on the right-hand page. Sixty units cover approximately 1,200 new vocabulary items. Firmly based on current vocabulary acquisition theory, Vocabulary in Use promotes good learning habits and teaches students how to discover rules for using vocabulary correctly. Both an intermediate and upper-intermediate level are also available. Each level offers an index with phonetic transcriptions and a complete answer key, as well as an edition without answers.

Signs Taken for Wonders
Signs Taken for Wonders

Author: Franco Moretti

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2020-05-05

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 1789605296

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Shakespearean tragedy and Dracula, Sherlock Holmes and Ulysses, Frankenstein and The Waste Land-all are celebrated "wonders" of modern literature, whether in its mandarin or popular form. However, it is the fact that these texts are so central to our contemporary notion of literature that sometimes hinders our ability to understand them. Franco Moretti applies himself to this problem by drawing skillfully on structuralist, sociological and psycho-analytic modes of enquity in order to read these texts as literary systems which are tokens of wider cultural and political realities. In the process, Moretti offers us compelling accounts of various literary genres, explores the relationships between high and mass culture in this century, and considers the relevance of tragic, Romantic and Darwinian views of the world.

The Child, the State and the Victorian Novel
The Child, the State and the Victorian Novel

Author: Laura C. Berry

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published:

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9780813934570

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The Child, the State, and the Victorian Novel traces the the story of victimized childhood to its origins in nineteenth-century Britain. Almost as soon as "childhood" became a distinct category, Laura C. Berry contends, stories of children in danger were circulated as part of larger debates about child welfare and the role of the family in society. Berry examines the nineteenth-century fascination with victimized children to show how novels and reform writings reorganize ideas of self and society as narratives of childhood distress. Focusing on classic childhood stories such as Oliver Twist and novels that are not conventionally associated with particular social problems, such as Dickens's Dombey and Son, the Brontë sisters' Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and George Eliot's Adam Bede, Berry shows the ways in which fiction that purports to deal with private life, particularly the domain of the family, nevertheless intervenes in public and social debates. At the same time she examines medical, legal, charitable, and social-relief writings to show how these documents provide crucial sources in the development of social welfare and modern representations of the family.

My Mother/my Self
My Mother/my Self

Author: Nancy Friday

Publisher:

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780006382515

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Nancy Friday shows that the key to a woman's character lies in her relationship with her mother - that first binding relationship which becomes the model for so much of women's adult relationships with men, and whose fetters constrain her sexuality, independence and very selfhood.

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.

Erasing Frankenstein
Erasing Frankenstein

Author: Elizabeth Effinger

Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press

Published: 2024-07-23

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 1771126191

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Who gets to write poetry? Whose voices are made public? Whose voices are heeded? Erasing Frankenstein showcases a creative exchange between federally incarcerated women and members of the prison education think tank Walls to Bridges Collective at the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ontario, and graduate and undergraduate students from the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. Working collaboratively by long-distance mail, the artists and contributors made the first-ever poetic adaptation of Frankenstein, turning it into a book-length erasure poem, I or Us. An example of “found art,” an erasure poem is created by erasing or blacking out words in an existing text; what is left is the poem. The title reflects the nature of the project: participants have worked as “I”’s, each creating their own erased pages, but together worked as an “us” to create a collaged “monster” of a book. Erasing Frankenstein presents the original erasure poem I or Us alongside reflections from participants on the experience.