Day 15
English 101H, Section 1399
https://english101allen.wikispaces.com/home
For Today:
15. W 10/15 TURN IN: Library Workshop.
READ: Frankenstein. Volume III
FOCUS: Annotation: how and why? Effective research reading.
Introduction to Frankenstein. What is a novel?
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Quiz: Frankenstein, Europe, Mary Shelley, Romantics. (Attendance.)
Discuss Frankenstein text.
Annotated Bibliography. How to make one. Plagiarism, avoiding.
o Review Hacker pages 358 to 361.
o Twelve sources related to your thesis, at least three book sources.
Review Notebook pages assignment (500 words).
o What bothers you, what interests you, what connections can you make to
other texts, what don’t you understand?
Development of this thing called a novel.
For Next Class:
16. M 10/20 TURN IN: Notebook pages on the novels and research reading.
READ: Robert Sawyer, Mary Shelley and Shakespeare: Monstrous
Creations.
FOCUS: Discuss novel. Assign thesis prompts. Discuss issues regarding
the prompt and novel. How to devise and research a thesis topic.
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The rise of books, reading and novels:
Long form verse stories or epics have existed since antiquity, first in oral form then in
limited written form to be read. But until printing and paper (rather than velum), the
novel could not exist.
Gutenberg was the first European to use movable type printing, around 1439. The
technology spread to Italy, France, Germany and Spain in the decades that followed.
Prose became the medium of the urban commercial book market in 15th century Europe.
This corresponded to the development of silent and private reading.
Amadis de Gaula, by García Montalvo, became the first ficton best-seller, sometime
before 1508. (A chronicle of Magellan’s voyage became a non-fiction best-seller around
the same time.)
The first true European novel is said to be Don Quixote, published in 1605.
However, early works of extended fictional prose, or novels, include works in Latin like
the Satyricon by Petronius (c. 50 AD), and The Golden Ass by Apuleius (c. 150 AD).
Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji (1010) has been described as the world's first novel.
Romances, Romans, Histories, Novels.
Romances had circulated in lavishly ornamented manuscripts to be read out to audiences.
The printed book allowed a comparatively inexpensive alternative for the special purpose
of silent and or private reading.
Women of wealthier households had learned to read in the 14th and 15th centuries and
had become customers of religious devotion. The Protestant Reformation enkindled
propaganda and press wars that lasted into the 18th century. Broadsheets and newspapers
became the new media of public information.
The personal letter became a favorite medium of communication among 17th-century
men and women, as many Dutch period paintings show.
Sir John Mandeville's Voyages—went through innumerable editions between 1500 and
1800.
People bought books because they were modern and fashionable. But what books to buy
and read was a perennial problem.
Split between Scientific books and romances, and also high books and low books
occurred in 1500s. Amadis and Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel were the most
important publications that lead into this divide.
In the 1700s a separate market for literature did not exist as all books were sold as history
and politics. Most histories in the sense we think of now were of dubious scholarship.
Delarivier (Delia) Manley, Atlantis, 1709, wrote about Whig scandals masked as events
in a fictional foreign place, was sued and won, claiming her work was a fiction. (She cowrote the Examiner with Swift for awhile.) She was a bad girl and her rep as a writer
was based on that bad girl fame.
Rise of the novel, or at least realistic fiction, in 1700s. (Ian Watts, 1957). In English, 23K titles a year, of which 20-60 are novels.
By the mid-18th century it was no longer clear whether the market had not simply
developed two linked terms: "romance" as the generic term, and "novel" as a term for a
fashionable product that focused on modern life.
The late 18th century brought an answer with the Romantic Movement's readiness to
reclaim the word romance, especially with the gothic romance, but the historical novels
of Walter Scott also have a strong romance element. Robinson Crusoe became a "novel"
in this period appearing now as a work of the new realistic fiction that the 18th century
had created.
Name______________________________________ Date_______________________
Quiz: Background on Frankenstein
1. True or False: William Godwin, who wrote Inquiry Concerning Political Justice and
Caleb William, was Mary Shelley’s father and Mary Wollestonecraft, who wrote
Vindication of the Rights of Women, was Mary Shelley’s mother.
2. True or False: Mary Shelley’s mother and father were famous English Radicals of their
day.
3. True or False: Mary Wollestonecraft ran off with another man right after she gave birth
to her daughter Mary.
4. True or False: Mary Shelley, (née Godwin) was born in 1797 and died in 1851.
5. True or False: at age seventeen, Mary Godwin ran off to Europe with young Charles
Dickens.
6. True or False: In the beginning at least, Mary’s parents supported the French
Revolutionary cause, much to the distaste of many in England.
7. True or False: Though a complex and chaotic event, the French Revolution, which
began in 1789, went through a Republican phase and a Reign of Terror. Eventual it
devolved into a dictatorship as Napoleon Bonaparte took charge.
8. True or False: Luckily, England did not become involved in the Napoleonic Wars and
was able to sit quietly on the sidelines as Europe burned.
9. True or False: Romanticism is a philosophical, literary, and artistic movement that
began in the mid 18th century as a reaction against Enlightenment ideals.
10. True or False: The Romantic aesthetic tended to champion the outdoors and rural
landscapes, the exotic and far away, sensory experience, and emotions such as
apprehension, horror, and awe.
11. Circle the name of the person in this group who is not an English Romantic poet:
William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Samuel Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley.
12. True or False: Percy Shelley fell in love with young Mary Godwin, despite the fact
that he disagreed violently with her father’s political views.