When Mary Shelley was writing Frankenstein, the arctic loomed large in the popular imagination thanks the newly idle Royal Navy’s resurgence in interest in arctic exploration following the Napoleonic wars
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Pentridge Uprising of 1817
When the leaders of the Pentridge uprising were executed in November, Percy Shelley responded with a political pamphlet deploring the state of a country torn between the alternatives of anarchy and oppression
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Romantics and the sublime
Romanticism used the concept of the sublime to convey a transcendental imagination capable of mediating between the individual and the divine
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Romanticism
For the Romantics, the imagination is used both to escape the world and transform. Such creativity is seen as powerful, God-like, leading to an emphasis on the assertion of the self and the value of individual experience
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Shelley's mother
Mary Shelley was the daughter of two political philosophers. Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, author of one of the greatest feminist texts, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
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Shelley's father
William Godwin, her father, was author of An Enquiry concerning Political Justice
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Paying bodysnatchers
Mary Shelley grew up during the era of the body snatchers. At that time, the only legal source of bodies for dissection was the gallows, but there were not enough murderers' bodies to supply the needs of all the medical students of London
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Mary's Villa Diodati dream
I saw – with shut eyes, but acute mental vision – I saw the pale student of the unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together
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Fantasmagoriana- Villa Diodati
When Byron suggested the idea of writing ghost stories, inspiration was taken from a collection of German horror stories, translated under the title Fantasmagoriana
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Philosophical discussions- Villa Diodati
During conversations between Byron and Percy Shelley that Mary Shelley was privy to, the nature of the principle of life was pondered upon and the probability of it being discovered
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Galavanism- 1781
Luigi Galvani found that frog’s legs twitched as if alive when struck by a spark of electricity. In her 1831 Preface to the novel, Mary Shelley mentions ‘galvanism’ as an influence upon her story
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Aldini- 1803
In 1803, Aldini, Galvani's nephew, was able to experiment with some success upon a criminal. Onlookers report that Forster’s eye opened, his right hand was raised and clenched, and his legs moved
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'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' allusion
Like Victor, the ancient mariner defies God; in shooting the albatross he disturbs the natural order and like Victor his world is transformed into an isolated wasteland
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'Paradise Lost' allusion
The monster echoes Satan’s words in Paradise Lost, particularly when declaring to Walton that, after his potential companion had been destroyed, “Evil thenceforth became my good”
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Other cards in this set
Card 2
Front
When the leaders of the Pentridge uprising were executed in November, Percy Shelley responded with a political pamphlet deploring the state of a country torn between the alternatives of anarchy and oppression
Back
Pentridge Uprising of 1817
Card 3
Front
Romanticism used the concept of the sublime to convey a transcendental imagination capable of mediating between the individual and the divine
Back
Card 4
Front
For the Romantics, the imagination is used both to escape the world and transform. Such creativity is seen as powerful, God-like, leading to an emphasis on the assertion of the self and the value of individual experience
Back
Card 5
Front
Mary Shelley was the daughter of two political philosophers. Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, author of one of the greatest feminist texts, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
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