Archive for December 11, 2010
THE CASEBOOK OF VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN by Peter Ackroyd
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus in 1818, and it stands as a classic marker of the intersection between the Romantic and Industrial Ages. The most superficial aspect of her idea — a being created from human corpses by the use of electricity that turns out to be a monster — has been transformed by Hollywood into a clichГ© of the horror genre. Yet Mary Shelley’s original work has profound moral and philosophical implications that shed a great deal of light on the thought of the time, and are relevant in many respects to debates in our own age, such as cloning and stem-cell research. Peter Ackroyd’s retelling of the story might seem superfluous, except that for modern readers it manages to cut even closer to the heart of what made the original novel so important, not least in its pitch-perfect evocation of early 19th-century style and intellectual portrait of the age.
December 11, 2010
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Judi Clark В· 
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Tags: 19th-Century, Historical В· Posted in: Award Winning Author, Gothic, Reading Guide, Real People Fiction, Time Period Fiction
