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British Literature Videos 176 videos

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Description:

We wonder if Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin knew that her campfire story would still be inspiring fear in the hearts of literature-dreading students hundreds of years later...

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:04

Frankenstein's monster is one of the most famous monsters out [Frankenstein's monsters face]

00:07

there we recognize that green skin bolt neck blunk anywhere but Frankenstein's

00:12

monster didn't just pop into existence out of nowhere and that's good because [Frankenstein's monster appears beside a sign of welcome to nowhere]

00:15

if that was the case well it'd make showers alot scarier well the story of Frankenstein

00:20

starts all the way back in the summer of 1816 Mary Wollstonecraft Goodwin was

00:26

hanging out in a swiss lake house with her lover and future husband Percy [Mary and Percy outside a lake house]

00:31

Shelley, Lord Byron John Polidori yeah and some other less famous people

00:36

were there too all right well during the vacation Lord Byron challenged everyone

00:39

to come up with the scariest freakiest spookiest story they could and since [Lord Byron challenging everyone to come up with a scary story over a campfire]

00:43

this was 1816 it couldn't just be a story about a weak Wi-Fi signal that

00:47

kept getting lost then mysteriously coming back then even more mysteriously [WiFi losing signal on a macbook screen]

00:52

getting lost again ooh.. well Goodwin came up with something even

00:57

better than all that the foundations of what would eventually become [Green Frankenstein's monster appears and boy runs out of room]

01:00

Frankenstein or the modern prometheus once she had the idea there was still

01:06

the matter of writing it like most novels of the era Frankenstein is an

01:10

epistle that is a literary work written as a letter or as a series of letters [epistle definition]

01:15

and this wasn't exactly revolutionary many early English novels were

01:19

epistolary some like Dracula were supposedly a whole bunch of letters [Dracula boook with letters leaking out]

01:23

while others had a narrative frame presented as though they were a diary or

01:28

journal that someone just happened to stumble upon and then just happened to

01:33

send to a publisher so made thousands of copies and a sort of thing anyone with a [Jim's diary sent to a publisher and thousands of books appear]

01:37

private diary would be just fine to it yeah anywho Frankenstein is told through

01:42

letters and Goodwin was not the least bit afraid of setting up lots and lots

01:46

of narrative layers at one point captain Walton records Victor Frankenstein

01:51

quoting the monster telling the De Lacey story making for a whopping four [4 layers of narrative layers]

01:56

layers of narrative if you need to lie down after that we don't blame you [boy thinking about taking a nap]

01:59

Frankenstein's not only epistlary but it also adopted one of the new

02:04

novelistic forms that was sweeping the first half of the 19th century the

02:08

three-volume novel or triple decker we hope one of those layers has bacon one of the [Three books titled Fran-Ken-Stein]

02:14

main structural innovations of the three-volume novel was the cliffhanger

02:18

since they always had a couple of volume breaks there was extra reason to amp up [man hanging off the edge of a cliff]

02:22

the suspense so there you have it a bit more background information on

02:26

Frankenstein's monster and still that doesn't make you want to take a shower with them [Frankenstein's monster chasing a man wearing a towel]

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