Friday 12 March 2021

Frankenstein: AO3 and AO4 quotes


‘Everything must have a beginning ... and that beginning must be linked to something that went before ... Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.’

Mary Shelley, from her Introduction to Frankenstein, 1831
 

 

‘My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie.’

Mary Shelley, from her Introduction to Frankenstein, 1831
 

 

‘It is ironic but entirely appropriate that ... the nameless monster seems to have usurped the name of his creator.’

M.K. Joseph, Introduction to Frankenstein, Oxford World Classics Edition, 1998
 

 

‘Horace Walpole ... attempts to blend imagination and probability.  Other writers of Gothic narratives do the same, placing the reader in that liminal state between our real world and the world of imagined fears and horrors.  They also, through their narrative methods, provide an unsettling fragmentation of perspective, an unnerving sense of dark truths hidden below, or embedded in, our everyday lives ...’

Bernard O’Keeffe, ‘Strange But True?’, The English Review, February 2011
 

 

‘Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.  One man thinks himself the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they.’

Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762
 

 

‘Mary Shelley is not an anti-Enlightenment figure.  Her novel is not an out-and-out rejection of Godwin or Percy Shelley – to say that is to insult her as an intellectual.  It is better to think of Frankenstein as an analysis of the dangers attendant on an exclusively intellectual approach to society.’

Dr Mike Rossington, in an interview with Jerome Monahan, ‘A Critic’s Perspective on Frankenstein’, emagazine 2010
 

 

‘... the monster is, in a literal sense, a projection of Frankenstein’s mind, and an embodiment of his guilt in withdrawing from his kind and pursuing knowledge which, though not forbidden, is still dangerous.’

M.K. Joseph, Introduction to Frankenstein, Oxford World Classics Edition, 1998

Tuesday 24 November 2020

Malfi:interpretations

Gemma Arteton on her interpretation of the Duchess https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4LM68fc4N9rCcxtW7m46gNG/gemma-arterton-extended-interview

Tuesday 17 November 2020

Elizabethan clothing

 http://www.shakespeare-online.com/biography/elizabethanclothes.html