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Frankenstein . Indeed, at one point of the novel, Little Brain is referred to as ‘Frankendoll’ (F, 101). If Frankenstein is a parable about the dangers to society of uncontrolled scientific advance, however, Fury is a parable about the dangers to the artist of uncontrolled consumer capitalism. Little Brain has become a global phenomenon, but, because she has been globalised ‘from above’, Solanka has lost control of the moral, intellectual and political meanings of his original work. The responsibility for his loss of control, moreover, is partly his own since it was his
Victorian train as a ‘cyborg engine’, frequently compared to Frankenstein’s creature. 22 Dalziel’s numerous rail-related prints included a cartoon of a cyborg-horse engraved after John Gordon Thomson for Hood’s Annual in 1875 ( Figure 10.14 ). A jockey rides a creature with the body and wheels of an engine, wings, amphibian legs, a fish tail and a
Girl, the Cock-Lane Ghost, Frankenstein’s monster, and the Man in the Iron Mask. Perhaps, Hood speculates, the author was ‘born / To be unknown’, having been abandoned as an infant pinned to an illegible ticket. Perhaps he is a scholar who stumbled on ‘a dusty pack / Of Rowley novels in an old chest hidden’. Whoever he is, Hood congratulates him as a ‘mystery-monger / Dealing it out like middle cut of salmon, / That people buy and can’t make head or tail of it; / (Howbeit that puzzle never hurts the sale of it;)’. Hood celebrates the author as showman and huckster
senses playing the female role within the classic gothic narrative. Behind her stands a long line of vulnerable gothic heroines, beginning with Isabella and Matilda in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765), and developed in characters such as Emily from Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Elizabeth from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).20 This strand of gothic is particularly associated with central and southern Europe, and like many of these heroines – like, indeed, her poetic champion John Keats, who died there – Beth has experience of that
’s Frankenstein. 17 If Brown borrows and competes with the composition of the Frankenstein image, Dalziel competes with its textural detail and effects, showing what wood engraving can do in comparison with the harder and much more expensive medium of steel. Figure 3.6 Dalziel
insistence within the novel on the social determinants which gave him little option but to act in the way he did. Gallagher’s analysis of the famous ‘Frankenstein’ analogy brings home this point sharply. The working class, like Frankenstein’s monster, is represented as ‘uneducated’ and ‘ungifted with a soul’ (in other words, socially determined); John Barton, as their representative, however, becomes ‘a visionary’, a process which, paradoxically, ‘shows a soul’ (necessary if he is to be a hero). Unlike that of earlier critics, however, Gallagher’s argument goes beyond the
), p. 206. Robert L. Caserio, ‘Joseph Conrad, Dickensian Novelist of the Nineteenth Century: A Dissent from Ian Watt’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, vol. 36, no. 3 (Dec 1981), pp. 337–47, p. 337. George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 6; Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, p. 167. For a detailed discussion of the emergence of literary modernism and its relation to earlier forms of literature see Michael H. Levenson’s A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study
these dangers. Danger in A Number arises from a lack of fatherly love – a refusal (as in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) of the creator to take responsibility for what he has made – not from loss of identity. With the exception of Sarah Kane’s Blasted, the plays and adaptations of novels discussed in the next three chapters all received productions in London in 2004 or 2005, many of them at the National Theatre. Before moving on to these texts, however, I want to end this chapter with a brief reference to Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, which was shortlisted for
, the tradition of grotesque satire in Swift and Rabelais meets the approaches of Lévi-Strauss and Mary Douglas, and the European tradition of Kafka and Céline meets the American Beat writers and drug users Burroughs and Kerouac. The profusion of influences that Thom Nairn sees in the work of Iain Banks (quoted at the beginning of this chapter) can also be traced in the ‘burrowings and borrowings’ of Self ’s fiction, which – like the grotesque body of Frankenstein’s monster – is made up of diverse elements. In the same way that Self incorporates a profusion of
, which combines (strikingly enough for its time) a strongly implicit lesbian sexuality with vampirism. Hesselius, as the author of ‘Essays on Metaphysical Medicine’ (ibid., 7), holds ideas deriving from German Romantic philosophy with traces of Swedenborg. He has been duly noticed as a ‘psychic doctor hero’ (Briggs, 1977, 38), or as ‘one of the first in a line of psychic doctors, or occult detectives’ (Cornwell, 1990, 91). While he may indeed, at least potentially, be seen as something of an amalgam of the questing Dr Frankenstein and the