Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
Women Writers Season 2025. Live online.
Greta Colombani on Mary Shelley’s great novel Frankenstein.
Frankenstein was famously inspired by a literary contest between Mary Shelley, her future husband Percy Shelley, the poet Lord Byron, and the physician and writer John Polidori about who would write the best tale of terror during a summer they all spent together in a villa close to Lake Geneva in 1816.
Frankenstein was originally conceived when Mary Shelley was only eighteen and first published anonymously a couple of years later in 1818. Revolving around Victor Frankenstein’s successful experiment in creating life from reassembling corpses and reanimating dead matter and its destructive consequences, the novel is considered one of the earliest examples of science fiction as well as one of the finest and most influential works of Gothic literature. Its enduring appeal in the popular imagination rests on the boldness and originality of Shelley’s vision but also on the fundamental questions that are posed by the novel. It explores the possibilities, limits, and moral responsibilities of science; the dangers of unbridled ambition; the longing for connection and understanding in the face of isolation and solitude, and the importance and shortcomings of language as a means to overcome alienation and prejudice.
Such crucial questions will be at the heart of this lecture which will investigate their universality and also the more specific ways in which Mary Shelley’s novel gives expression to prominent fears, desires, and anxieties characterising the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Live online lecture and seminar with Greta Colombani
Saturday 25 January 2025
18.00-20.00 British Time (GMT)
19.00-21.00 Central European Time
Prices
£32.00 full price
£27.00 students
£27.00 CAMcard holders
Women Writers Season 2025. Live online.
Greta Colombani on Mary Shelley’s great novel Frankenstein.
Frankenstein was famously inspired by a literary contest between Mary Shelley, her future husband Percy Shelley, the poet Lord Byron, and the physician and writer John Polidori about who would write the best tale of terror during a summer they all spent together in a villa close to Lake Geneva in 1816.
Frankenstein was originally conceived when Mary Shelley was only eighteen and first published anonymously a couple of years later in 1818. Revolving around Victor Frankenstein’s successful experiment in creating life from reassembling corpses and reanimating dead matter and its destructive consequences, the novel is considered one of the earliest examples of science fiction as well as one of the finest and most influential works of Gothic literature. Its enduring appeal in the popular imagination rests on the boldness and originality of Shelley’s vision but also on the fundamental questions that are posed by the novel. It explores the possibilities, limits, and moral responsibilities of science; the dangers of unbridled ambition; the longing for connection and understanding in the face of isolation and solitude, and the importance and shortcomings of language as a means to overcome alienation and prejudice.
Such crucial questions will be at the heart of this lecture which will investigate their universality and also the more specific ways in which Mary Shelley’s novel gives expression to prominent fears, desires, and anxieties characterising the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Live online lecture and seminar with Greta Colombani
Saturday 25 January 2025
18.00-20.00 British Time (GMT)
19.00-21.00 Central European Time
Prices
£32.00 full price
£27.00 students
£27.00 CAMcard holders
Women Writers Season 2025. Live online.
Greta Colombani on Mary Shelley’s great novel Frankenstein.
Frankenstein was famously inspired by a literary contest between Mary Shelley, her future husband Percy Shelley, the poet Lord Byron, and the physician and writer John Polidori about who would write the best tale of terror during a summer they all spent together in a villa close to Lake Geneva in 1816.
Frankenstein was originally conceived when Mary Shelley was only eighteen and first published anonymously a couple of years later in 1818. Revolving around Victor Frankenstein’s successful experiment in creating life from reassembling corpses and reanimating dead matter and its destructive consequences, the novel is considered one of the earliest examples of science fiction as well as one of the finest and most influential works of Gothic literature. Its enduring appeal in the popular imagination rests on the boldness and originality of Shelley’s vision but also on the fundamental questions that are posed by the novel. It explores the possibilities, limits, and moral responsibilities of science; the dangers of unbridled ambition; the longing for connection and understanding in the face of isolation and solitude, and the importance and shortcomings of language as a means to overcome alienation and prejudice.
Such crucial questions will be at the heart of this lecture which will investigate their universality and also the more specific ways in which Mary Shelley’s novel gives expression to prominent fears, desires, and anxieties characterising the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Live online lecture and seminar with Greta Colombani
Saturday 25 January 2025
18.00-20.00 British Time (GMT)
19.00-21.00 Central European Time
Prices
£32.00 full price
£27.00 students
£27.00 CAMcard holders