Adventures in Imagination: The Art and Writing of Kirstin Mills

Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald, Dreams, Hyperspace & Victorian Fantasy: Informing the Inklings

I am very excited to announce the publication of a wonderful collection of essays entitled Informing the Inklings: George MacDonald and the Victorian Roots of Modern Fantasy, edited by Michael Partridge and Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson (Winged Lion Press, 2018). Based on ground-breaking research presented at the George MacDonald Society Conference at The University of Oxford, 2014, which you can read about here, this collection of essays represents new directions not only in George MacDonald studies but also studies in Victorian fantasy, imagination, philosophy, science and more besides. Each of the twelve essays explores how MacDonald and fellow literary figures such as S. T. Coleridge, Lewis Carroll, Charles Kingsley, and Andrew Lang paved the way for the group of twentieth-century fantasy authors known as “the Inklings,” including C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. With contributions from major critics in the field such as Stephen Prickett, Malcolm Guite, Jean Webb and Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson, as well as newer voices from a range of international scholars, this book treads new territory while returning us to the roots of modern fantasy literature. (more…)

Moving Monsters: The First Frankenstein Film, 1910 (Anniversary Series #8)

October 31, 2018 In Academic Research All Blog Posts No Comment

Having explored some of the many fascinating and spooky contexts surrounding Mary Shelley’s novel, this final post for my 200th Anniversary Series looks at the novel’s entry into the glamorous world of film. Frankenstein has entered popular culture in a massive way, largely influenced by the famous 1931 film starring Boris Karloff with his neck bolts and lumbering frame, but did you know that this isn’t the earliest film adaptation of Frankenstein? Over twenty years earlier, in 1910, Edison Studios released a 15-minute feature that has become one of the most interesting films of the silent era. Designed to be accompanied by music, it loosely adapts Mary Shelley’s plot to represent the first time the monster was seen on screen. (more…)

Frankenstein, Galvanism & the Science of Raising the Dead (Anniversary Series #7)

October 30, 2018 In Academic Research All Blog Posts No Comment

A nervous crowd huddles in the makeshift amphitheater of a house near London’s Newgate Prison. The hum of voices rises and falls with the excited whispers and troubled exclamations of the surgeons and attending officials who have come to witness this spectacle. The lamps flicker overhead, casting a pool of wan light onto a table in the centre of the crowd; upon it, the pale, lifeless body of a man, hanged only hours before. In life he had been a murderer; now the purple bruise of the hangman’s noose swells darkly on his cold neck. The man leading the show busies himself around the corpse with shining metal equipment. An electric battery stands nearby, and the man leans over the corpse brandishing two conducting rods. The crowd hushes. A scintillating tremor of expectation sizzles through the mass of eager bodies, perched, awaiting what new horrors might be opened up by this latest scientific breach of the natural world – this time, of the boundary between life and death. The rods connect with the cold skin, a crackling buzz sounds – the electric pulse is delivered. A moment of quiet, and suddenly the dead man’s body moves. His eyes snap open and glare, glass-like, wide with animated horror at the men whose terrified gaze stares back. (more…)

Frankenstein’s Phantoms: Mary Shelley on Ghosts (Anniversary Series #6)

October 29, 2018 In Academic Research All Blog Posts No Comment

Everyone remembers Frankenstein‘s monster – helped along in large part by the 1931 film adaptation that made him so lumberingly, hulkingly corporeal. But fewer people remember that Mary Shelley’s most famous novel is also peopled heavily with ghosts, and a general pervading sense of the ghostly that reflects Shelley’s fascination with the supernatural and a genuine spiritual world. (more…)

Frankenstein, Death & the Tragic Life of Mary Shelley (Anniversary Series #5)

October 28, 2018 In Academic Research All Blog Posts No Comment

Frankenstein is all about death. Death is embodied not only in the creature, composed of dead human and animal body parts, scientifically brought to life, but especially in the many deaths this creature brings about – from Frankenstein’s child brother William (and indirectly, Justine, who the monster frames for the crime), to Frankenstein’s closest friend Henry Clerval, and even his new bride Elizabeth Lavenza. Deaths are also present in other ways: just before Frankenstein leaves for Ingolstadt to complete his education, his mother dies from illness, and his father later dies of grief and shock after Elizabeth’s death and the harrowing incidents haunting Frankenstein’s life. Indeed, death begins to stalk Frankenstein in ever greater measure until his own final moments, which leads Frankenstein to assume that he lives a cursed life – a wretch, doomed to wander the earth alone, in the company only of his departed loved ones who people his dreams (his waking life has become a living nightmare). This may sound like a tragic, gothic plot, but did you know that Mary Shelley’s life was itself even more tragic, and that it even began to eerily resemble, in many ways, the cursed fate of her eponymous character? (more…)

Mary Shelley & her Mother’s Ghost: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Grave, London

October 27, 2018 In Academic Research All Blog Posts Gothic Landscapes No Comment

A bitterly cold day has settled over London. The teeming bustle of St. Pancras Station lies nearby, but a hush falls over a small churchyard tucked in the streets behind it. The few remaining leaves overhead rustle dryly against the skeletal fingers of the trees that scrape the suffocatingly close, grey sky. In summer this unassuming, almost humdrum cemetery would be teeming with life, tourists huddled around one particular headstone – the one-time resting place of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, as its inscription reads – but now there is something hauntingly barren about the place. Golden lamps glow behind the small windows of the church, an inviting warmth that seems to amplify the creeping cold outside that raises up from the hard frosted ground wrapped tightly around its silent inmates. (more…)

Overheard Tales: Coleridge, Shelley and Frankenstein’s Poetic Inspiration

October 26, 2018 In Academic Research All Blog Posts No Comment

Mary Shelley’s early life was made up of many wonderful and formative moments that would nestle in her memory, stoking her imagination, eventually to reemerge within her first and most famous novel, Frankenstein. For Day 3 of Frankenweek, this post explores one of these moments, experienced during her unique childhood, and its lingering impression on her. As the daughter of two of the most eminent writers of the age, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the young Mary Godwin was connected with many of the nineteenth-century’s greatest thinkers, who would often visit to converse with her father. Mary was often allowed to join these conversations, as a listener and occasional contributor. Undoubtedly the most significant of these visitors – and the one who would leave the most indelible impression on Mary – was the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (more…)

A Frankenstein Travel Guide: Mary Shelley’s Journeys into the Sublime (Anniversary Series #2)

October 25, 2018 In Academic Research All Blog Posts Gothic Landscapes No Comment

The second in my Frankenstein at 200 Anniversary Blog Series looks at one of the most crucial elements of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: the profound sense of place that Shelley evokes as Frankenstein pursues his creature through increasingly wild and inhospitable landscapes that are repeatedly linked with death and the supernatural. From the seas of ice that open and close the novel, threatening to swallow and crush Walton’s ship, to the glacial summits of Mont Blanc, landscapes indicate the wild, sublime and insurmountable limits of nature that Frankenstein has attempted to transgress in his scientific creation of the ‘monster’, but which ultimately still wield their immense and unforgiving power over his mortal frame. They also represent Frankenstein’s increasing distance from the safe comforts of home, family and society – Frankenstein’s only comfort in such wild and harsh terrain is the spirits of the dead that seem naturally at home in such regions. But did you know that Shelley’s depiction of these landscapes is drawn from her own exciting travels, and that her experiences in these incredible real-life places form one of the central inspirations behind her novel? (more…)

The Birth of Frankenstein: Ghost Stories, Vampires & Villa Diodati (Anniversary Series #1)

October 24, 2018 In Academic Research All Blog Posts No Comment

Today marks the beginning of Frankenweek, and I’m celebrating with the first post in my Frankenstein at 200: Anniversary Blog Series. The story of the birth of Frankenstein as part of a ghost-story-telling competition in a storm-lashed lakeside villa is almost as haunting and fantastic as the novel itself. In the summer of 1816, the young Mary Godwin, only 18 years old, had just travelled to the continent with her lover, the married Percy Shelley, their infant son, William, and Mary’s step sister, Clare Clairmont. After meeting with the celebrated poet Lord Byron and his travelling physician Dr John Polidori in Geneva, they settled in a small lakeside cottage only a short walk away from Byron’s much grander rented mansion, the Villa Diodati. The parties met frequently, and it was at this villa, surrounded by vineyards and with magnificent views of the towering mountains and the shimmering lake beneath, that Frankenstein experienced its first sparks of life. (more…)