Frankenstein and
ROMANTICISM
Connections?
Read and Respond:
“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”
WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and
measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much
applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
Walt Whitman
The way a person is raised has
more influence over his/her
character and actions than
his/her genetic traits.
 Humans have no business
interfering with natural processes
like the creation/cloning of life.
A creator is always
responsible for his creation.
 Progress must allow for a
certain amount of
destruction.
Subtitle and Epigraph
“or, The Modern Prometheus”
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?
-John Milton, Paradise Lost
Romanticism: 1770-1860
 Backlash to the Enlightenment and the Age of
Reason
 5 I’s:
 Imagination (necessary for creation of art)
 Intuition (feeling over reason)
 Individualism (independent thought)
 Idealism (making the world a better place)
 Inspiration (NATURE, using imagination)
Delacroix, “Liberty Leading the People,” 1830
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMYNfQlf1H8
Mary Shelley: 1797-1851
Percy Shelley: 1792-1822
Mary Wollstonecraft: 1759-1797
Lord Byron: 1788-1824