Introduction

Afterlife: Summary

Frankenstein has forced us to engage with the ethical challenges of our time, considering who today is the “modern prometheus,” and if what they do is subject to the same dangers of Shelley’s Frankenstein and scientific progress.

Today the book stays relevant as it is constantly generating modern, relevant discussion, beyond just that of its time: if anything, the book is becoming more relevant.

The essence of the novel is such, that is it extremely malliable to interpretation, but one thing remains constant: Frankenstein is a relevant and evolving criticism to today’s scientific progress, which will stay with us as long as we enjoy scientific progress in the first place.

Romantic fiction: Summary & Notes

• Prose lit looked down upon
• Such literature has primarily become once more popular due to “historicists, Marxists, feminists, and other forms of anticanonical criticism.”
• this, however, pales to Romantic poetry.
• largely, Romantic fiction thus seems confined to historicalissues
• Romantic lit is also considered largely a form of ideological communication
• cheap fiction
• evangelical fiction disseminated a diminutive version of beourgeois culture and values
• “used in the struggle for ideological self-definition within the professional middle classes to project their domination of other classes”
• this cheap literature, like Romantic fiction, is often thought of as a seedbed for pop culture and thus for lower-class political disaffection during the 1790s.
• this cheap literature soon became a tool for intervening in social conflict
• Romantic fiction, however, was not the worst kind of fiction. Thus, out of desperation, the middle class saught to educate their children with it to avoid them coming in contact with lower, even worse literature, as well as to make learning more appealing.

Key points:

• novels became much more popular due to removal of copyright 1774
• they became extremely popular as easy reading, but where very looked down upon by higher classes.
• they even became popular in middle classes, in an attempt to stop children from reading even worse, lower class literature.
• this accompanied a number of political movements; some analysists have suggested that the French Revolution and feminism.
• the political landscape in Britain at this time was extremely harsh, the British government disapproved of all that influenced the middle and higher classes: magazines were harshly taxed, newspaper editors were prosecuted to intimidate, and novels were attacked by moralists.

Paragraph Analysis, p. 21

• playfellow, docile, summer insect, “[she] could submit with more grace […] to constraint and caprice,” bird, attractive softness, most fragile creature in the world, tend on her as on a favorite animal.
• 21 adjectives
• incredibly, unbelievably objectifying.