/lit/ - Literature

>>14552152
It's gothic masterpiece and potentially a future true story.

liked it

>>14552182
>>14552191
I was surprised how much focused on Victor Frankenstein. What about you?

>>14552196
Well, the name of the books is "Frankenstein", literally the surname of one of the characters. Or "The Modern Prometheus", that would be Victor. So it didn't surprise me.

Reading it rn, its very comfy.

>>14552152
Started with Dracula, found out it and Frankenstein were written as a contest, decided to check it out because I liked Dracula. Gave up about half way through.

>>14552152
I read Frankenstein in 8th grade and it remained one of my favorite books for nearly a decade. My knowledge of the book and factoids surrounding it helped me expose my Sophomore year English literature teacher to myself as a pseud: after she put incorrect information in a quiz, marked me wrong for it, had me confront her, and she denying she was wrong right up to the moment I had her check the internet. The look on her face was priceless; and I learned at that moment that authority meant nothing and I could be more well informed than any of my elders, let alone my peers.

It helped me breeze through my AP English Lit exam a year later, earning me a 5. You have to sift through an incredibly dense amount of new vocabulary as well as advanced grammatical structures to yourself thanks to Percy Shelley's editing, so reading it is an entire English lesson in itself.

It is better than ANY adaptation film or otherwise that has come out since. It is also ironically the best piece of work not only she's ever done, but better than anything Lord Byron or Percy ever wrote themselves.

Now, while I think it's a well-written piece of work, I understand now its message is outdated, so I wouldn't necessarily hail it as a GOAT. But out of that whole century? Easily a Top 5 novel.

There is no one on /lit/ who knows this book better than I do.

Picrel was my edition and the one I recommend.

>>14552152

It's a great book.

>>14552152
Poorly written and the plot was bad
Some parts were strange in a good way which redeemed it a bit

Why didn't Frankenstein just put a bomb in the female monster's pussy?

Quite comfy and fucked up. I really felt sorry for that kid, in the barn if I remember correctly.
My old English teacher who was a huge gothic fan said that one of the pitfalls of Frankenstein is how the monster was way too sophisticated in speech, and that if Mary Shelley was a bit more mature as a writer she would've been able make the monster speak more believably like a monster.

>>14553425
It was Polidori’s the Vampyre that was written as a part of a contest with Mary Shelley anyway

Any anons read Caleb Williams by Godwin?

>>14553704
Any particularly interesting wisdom to share anon?

>>14552152
frankenstein is an allegory for zionist bolshevik capitalist jews

>>14554000

I just remembered, Mary Shelley used John Locke's philosophy, the tabula rasa, for her monster. You can see it working when he recounts escaping from Frankenstein's lab and wondering through the forest, then learning and gaining and education at that small families' house or cabin in the woods when that guy was teaching that Turkish or Greek woman his language and some general education lessons.

>>14552152
Best book written by a woman.

>>14554771

Mary Shelley is a good writer, but you're forgetting Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters.

>>14553704
how is its message outdated?

Extremely poorly written. Uninteresting characters, bad plot full of artificial coincidences, and half-baked themes.

Mary Shelley is a hack.

>>14553704
>afterword by Harold Bloom

>>14552152
written by a woman

>>14552152
What I think is you should stop shitting up the catalog with nonsense.

>>14555111
double trips

>>14554809
Modern Prometheus > "Society novels"

>>14553425
Dracula was written nearly a century after Frankenstein.....

>>14554360
Your teacher was a brainlet who watched too many Frankenstein movies and then read the book and thought, "Why isn't it like da moovies?" The creature's education and appeal in speech vs. how he's perceived visually is a huge part of the novel.

>>14552152
I didn't like the beginning very much but once things pick up it made for a very good read in the second half. I was disappointed to find many of the scientific details were omitted by Victor. I suppose from my prior reading of Dracula I expected him to go into how he brought life to a giant, yellow corpse. I also expected a hunchback assistant to be somewhere in the story but other than it's an excellent and bitter tale of a virtuist and his incel abomination going at it. Legitimately felt his pain when his buddy dies in Ireland.

>>14555279

I think Jane Austen also wrote a Gothic novel, sort of. Wikipedia says "Northanger Abbey" is a satire of Gothic novels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northanger_Abbey

Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre" also has some Gothic elements, one of them being the crazed woman in the attic, Bertha.

>>14555302

I think in Shelley's "Frankenstein," technology is what destroys the characters, whereas in "Dracula," technology is what the characters use against the forces of darkness, technology is what helps them, or tries to.

>>14555891

There was a chapter in Moby Dick where the narrator goes into detail about the whales, different kinds of whales and why they are hunted and what kind of resource they provide, I think, I don't exactly remember. One of the college professor, back when I was at the University of Guam, said that it was a chapter that was better suited for the appendices, I can't remember if he said it was an awful chapter or not, but he probably did. At least Mary Shelley got philosophy of John Lock, that Tabula Rasa stuff, at least she got that right.

anyone else get strong antinatalist undertones from this book? i know shelly had children but i still couldn't help but see the idea of artificially creating life as metaphor for the arrogance of conception. like she was trying to portray the act in an unnatural light to free us of our biases. the reason that what frankenstein did was wrong is not that he did something unnatural but that he created a being that would only suffer and cause suffering while only considering how he would feel about it.

>>14552152
the sonic homophony of read and read is a blight on the english language.

>>14556210
Her mom died a horrific death due to complications birthing her.

>>14552152
It's a great novel. Many retards call it a "science fiction" novel; this is fucking retarded. The monster is created through magic in a laboratory. Agrippa, for instance, is mentioned by Frankenstein, along with other such writers. Those retards ignore the most important point of the novel; that the monster was inherently good, did good deeds secretly, and wanted to live among men. The only man who could like him was blind. All others rejected and were disgusted by his sight; yet he was good. Then he became what he became.

<——
Better with the fan edit

>>14557719
>magic
It’s Horror imo, but where do you get magic from?

>>14557719
Agrippa-type stuff is influential on Frankenstein but he's eventually told he wasted all his time on that and has to learn actual science. He learns chemistry, and parts of the novel are inspired by contemporary experiments in things like galvanism. The specifics of the science are left vague, but the gist is that he applies the commanding vision of the alchemists with the productive power of the science to advance the latter to heights overly studious scientists do not otherwise dare to go.

Because it's kept so vague, it's not really science fiction, and it's certainly not what people call "hard sci-fi." And like a lot of soft sci-fi, the vague intimations of science might as well just be magic. It's in line with what later becomes known as science-fiction, but the main issue is just that Shelley wouldn't have thought of it in those terms. It draws on the gothic tradition and blends recent scientific experiment with the supernatural to enhance the sense of horror. You're supposed to be able to almost imagine such a creature being encountered in Walton's scientific voyage.

>>14552152
The only masterpiece written by a female.

>>14553704
op here I really liked it, It was the first book I read in a long time and first for this year. Any interesting facts you know?

>>14556660
i did know that but never connected it to my theory. thanks anon.