Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 The Memory and Impact of Oral Performance: Shaping the Understanding of Late Medieval Readers
- 2 Print, Miscellaneity and the Reader in Robert Herrick's Hesperides
- 3 Searching for Spectators: From Istoria to History Painting
- 4 Returning to the Text of Frankenstein
- 5 ‘Casualty’, Mrs Shelley and Seditious Libel: Cleansing Britain's Most Corrupt Poet of Error
- 6 Writing Textual Materiality: Charles Clark, his Books and his Bookplate Poem
- 7 Charles Dickens's Readers and the Material Circulation of the Text
- 8 Victorian Pantomime Libretti and the Reading Audience
- 9 Material Modernism and Yeats
- 10 Changing Audiences: The Case of the Penguin Ulysses
- 11 The Sound of Literature: Secondary School Teaching on Reading Aloud and Silent Reading, 1880–1940
- 12 Intermediality: Experiencing the Virtual Text
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
4 - Returning to the Text of Frankenstein
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 The Memory and Impact of Oral Performance: Shaping the Understanding of Late Medieval Readers
- 2 Print, Miscellaneity and the Reader in Robert Herrick's Hesperides
- 3 Searching for Spectators: From Istoria to History Painting
- 4 Returning to the Text of Frankenstein
- 5 ‘Casualty’, Mrs Shelley and Seditious Libel: Cleansing Britain's Most Corrupt Poet of Error
- 6 Writing Textual Materiality: Charles Clark, his Books and his Bookplate Poem
- 7 Charles Dickens's Readers and the Material Circulation of the Text
- 8 Victorian Pantomime Libretti and the Reading Audience
- 9 Material Modernism and Yeats
- 10 Changing Audiences: The Case of the Penguin Ulysses
- 11 The Sound of Literature: Secondary School Teaching on Reading Aloud and Silent Reading, 1880–1940
- 12 Intermediality: Experiencing the Virtual Text
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
One could be forgiven for thinking that there was little left to say about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Over the past thirty years or so the novel has been at the centre of various disciplinary reforms and revolutions, from the rise of feminist literary criticism to the canon-changing re-evaluation of Romantic literature in Britain, the United States of America and elsewhere. It has become one of the most talked about, one of the most taught, and one of the most written about texts of the Romantic period. One perhaps could be forgiven, also, for being a little tired of Frankenstein. Scholars of Mary Shelley have themselves shown signs of such a weariness in the past ten years or so, as one can see from such book titles as The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, or Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after Frankenstein. The desire of critics and scholars dedicated to Mary Shelley's work to get ‘beyond Frankenstein’ is understandable. We need to remember, however, that in order to ‘go beyond’ something, we should have a good idea of what that something is. It turns out that, despite a certain collective weariness with Frankenstein, and despite a perceived over-concentration on this one, famous novel, we did not know that novel sufficiently, and in many cases were in fact talking about a novel ‘we’, rather than ‘the Author of Frankenstein’, had invented.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Readings on Audience and Textual Materiality , pp. 51 - 60Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014