The novel and authorship

1. The novel and authorship Dr Cathia Jenainati H539

2. Plan • Frankenstein and the Gothic tradition • The novel and authorship: • Circumstances of the novel’s genesis • Shelley’s revised preface of 1831 • Authorship and adaptations • Authorial intervention (structure) • Theories of authorship • Synthesis

3. Not Gothic • No vulnerable heroine at centre • No focus on castle / house / trappings-passages / cellars / attics • Geographical movements • Not supernatural

4. Gothic elements • fear • vestiges of the supernatural in language • “unhallowed acts” • psychological doubling • the central act of the protagonist is to interpret.

6. Circumstances of writing • In 1816 • Second preface in 1831 • She “felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship”

7. Luigi Galvani, “Animal Electricity”

8. Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During one of these, various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated. They talked of the experiments of Dr. Darwin, … who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion. Not thus, after all, would life be given. Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endured with vital warmth.

9. Erasmus Darwin The Botanic Garden 1791

10. Frightful as it must be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the World • “the working of some powerful engine"

11. The 1831 Introduction • “replaces, re-presents or transforms the text with the imposition of a new frame, a frame which then grounds critical interpretations.” (Fred Botting)

12. Walton Victor creature Joseph Kestner, “Narcissism as symptom and structure: the case of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” • Mise en abyme

13. New critics • Wimsatt and Beardsley, “the intentional fallacy” (1954) • The critic’s text vs the author’s text • the author’s intentions are impossible to decipher and are not necessary for understanding her work • The “autotelic” text [autonomous text]

14. But • New Critics’ position was countered by ideologically driven critics such as: • Marxist • Feminist • New historicist… who restored the author’s milieu to the text

15. But, • Roland Barthes: “The death of the author…the birth of the reader” • Michel Foucault: “the author occupies a subjecting function”

16. Paul O’Flinn • the 2 issues that influenced the story were: “the impact of technological developments on people’s lives and the possibility of working-class revolution” • “Those issues fuel the Luddite disturbances 1811-1817

17. Luddite disturbances • Luddites smashing loom in a factory in 1811

18. Irish Frankenstein • The caricature identifies the Phoenix Park assassinations as the work of the Irish parliamentary leader Charles Stuart Parnell.