Uncommon Content: Mary Shelley

Showing posts with label Mary Shelley. Show all posts

Friday, August 30, 2024

Birth of a Legend

Snoopy typing "It was a dark and stormy night."

Snoopy's unvarying opening line harkens back to 1830 when the English writer and politician novelist, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton penned the now-cliched sentence to open his novel, Paul Clifford. Like the fairytale opening of "Once upon a time," this formula ended up copied by many others over the years influencing Snoopy in his style of writing much like generative AI is trained by the models of writing it ingests as its training.

In fact, it is now influencing the title of a collection of works that predate 1830. A Dark and Stormy Night is the title of a collection of ghost stories told by Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft, who would later become Mary Shelley.

It references what was in fact a possibly dark and stormy afternoon in the spring of 1816 when the group that had traveled to Geneva told ghost stories to passed the time while stuck inside. Mary's story was one that has taken on a life of its own, and the standard flat-headed, green-tinted image of the monster Victor Frankenstein created popularized by countless film adaptations is more familiar to people today than stanzas of Romantic poetry.

Two years after her oral telling, Mary Shelley published her novel under the title Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, bringing to light the downside of the Prometheus impulse that her husband celebrated in his epic poem, Prometheus Unbound.

Most people who have read the novel have not read the 1818 version. Mary Shelley revised the novel, which was published anew in an 1831 edition. You can read about the changes entailed here.

While the legend of the Frankenstein monster was was born in 1816 in Geneva, Mary Wollstonecraft herself was born in 1797 in London, Her parents were the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who died just 10 days after her daughter's birth, and William Godwin. Her birthday is August 30th, the date of this post.

Happy (early) birthday, Shakespeare

What Do Cynthia Ozick and Snoopy have in common?

En)gendering Romanticism: A Study of Charlotte Bronte's Novels

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Telling a story through letters and posts

Don Quixote is the work that many identify as the first modern novel, a work distinct from epic romances or other high-brow treatments of fictions that were considered worthy of poetry rather than prose. Of course, that was not an English work, but a Spanish one. The novel genre only arrived in England nearly 2 centuries later, and often the stories were told in the form of letters.

Epistolary novels are set on the premise of the narrator, telling the story to a correspondent. Samuel Richardson opted for the epistolary form for both Pamela and Clarissa in the 1740s.  About a half a century later, Jane Austen used that form in Lady Susan. Some decade or two afterwards, Mary Shelley framed the story of the archetypal mad scientist, Frankenstein, in her novel of the same name by having the story related by the sailor who picks him up on his sea voyage in letters to his sister. However, as the novel gener took off during the 1800s, most dropped the epistolary device, even if they were written in first-person.

It hasn't disappeared altogether, though, modern treatments tend to mix the letters with narrative, often from different points of view, as in  The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.  Some contemporary novels substitute emails for letters and sometimes also throw in texts or social media style updates in telling their stories. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a novel that is relayed solely through tweets, possibly grouped under hashtags rather than traditional chapter titles.

But I wonder if anyone has attempted to tell a story through an online community bulletin board. I know that some reveal an awful lot about their lives through their posts -- about having children, having financial difficulties, attempts at getting a job, attempts at getting a loan, divorce, and calls for outright handouts. That's all from one person's posts over the past 3 or 4 years. For writers of fiction, I thought that such an account could form the central line of a narrative from which several key characters branch off.

Related interest:
http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2013/06/jane-austens-heroines-from-extroverted.html
http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2014/02/poetry-difference-between-practice-and.html

Monday, December 24, 2012

Dissertation on Charlotte Bronte

I completed my dissertation so long ago that the file format was saved on the 3.5" disc. Even my computer can't read that any more. Happily, I do have a paper copy on hand and a husband who has access to a scanner that could handle more than a single page at a time. I've uploaded the PDF here to make it easily accessible in an online format.

Uncommon Content

Don't buy me a coffee. Buy yourself a mug or some other Jane Austen product at my store.