Tag: Mary Shelley

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A Genius Montage for Mary Shelley

By Lillian Lu

*This post contains spoilers for the film Mary Shelley.*
The recently released film, Mary Shelley (2018), directed by Haifaa al-Mansour (Wadjda) and written by Emma Jensen (Creating Fortune), received, at best, lukewarm reviews. Most film critics were disappointed in how the narrative falls unexcitingly into the genre of biopic. Others lamented that the film does not do justice to Mary Shelley the historical figure, so ahead of her contemporaries, and that the screenplay allows her husband, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, to upstage her.
Continue reading “A Genius Montage for Mary Shelley”

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Intimate Estrangement: Depression and Finding Community Through Texts

By Stephanie Edwards

[Trigger warning: suicide, mental illness, self-harm]
When Carrie Fisher unexpectedly passed away in December of 2016, I was inconsolable. It was the day after Boxing Day and I was sat around the kitchen table with my extended family when I started scrolling through Twitter and began seeing tweets announcing her death. My eyes immediately began burning with tears and, as another member of my family saw the news on their phone and the group began talking about it, I excused myself to the bathroom. As soon as I shut the door I began to sob uncontrollably and remained in that state just long enough for my family to not suspect anything, wiped my tears, and rejoined them. I joined the conversation my family was having about her death and participated like any “normal” person would – acknowledging the sadness of the death of a celebrity you did not know and then moving on. What I could not tell my family in that moment was that I did know Carrie Fisher; I knew her intimately and she knew me, even though we had never met. We had spoken many times throughout my twenty-seven years of life, although not necessarily in the traditional sense. Our conversations happened through books, films, interviews, through our experiences and through our persisting bodies, all of which are intertwined with our illnesses.
Continue reading “Intimate Estrangement: Depression and Finding Community Through Texts”

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New Initiative: Romantic Bicentennials!

I’m pleased to announce a new initiative sponsored by the Keats-Shelley Association of America and the Byron Society of America: ROMANTIC BICENTENNIALS! This project offers scholars, readers, and the general public the opportunity to get involved and to receive updates about annual symposia, related conferences,  networked events, and other media celebrating 200 years of Romanticism.
The project’s main website (still under construction) is located here: http://dev-romantic-bicentenials.pantheon.io/. On the website, read about each day’s events 200 years ago, and stay informed about current scholarly events celebrating bicentennial anniversaries throughout 2016 to 2024 (Geneva to Missolonghi). There will be one major sponsored conference each year: this year, it’ll be on May 21st, at the New York Public Library, celebrating the Genevan Summer of 1816.
Reach out if you would like to get involved — we’re looking for people to live-tweet events with our hashtag #‎Romantics200‬! We are also looking for scholars to participate in the annual symposia, as well as to attend the networked events throughout the year. To stay in touch, connect with us through our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/romanticbicentennials/. (A twitter handle is coming soon). And write to me if you have questions!

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Female Cross-Dressers in 18th-Century and Romantic England

Welcome back, readers! As Managing Editor, I am excited to say that we have an all-star lineup of new bloggers, roundtables, and conferences to share with you this Fall. (For the identities of these mysterious new bloggers, who represent a wide selection of American and Canadian universities, take a look at Our Writers).
In the midst of getting organized for the new semester of NGSC blogging, though, I’m also preparing to give a presentation for my friend Katie Gemmill’s undergraduate seminar at Columbia, which she has brilliantly titled “Miss Behaviour: Transgressive Women in 18th-Century British Fiction.” In response to the assigned primary-source texts on dress, disguise, and gender, I will be providing some historical background for female cross-dressing during this period. Since I think blog readers are just as likely as students to be intrigued by the topic, I’ll introduce to you now some fascinating (and, most importantly, * real *) cases of female cross-dressing and concealed identity — especially in the context of same-sex relationships —  in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Continue reading “Female Cross-Dressers in 18th-Century and Romantic England”

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More Frankenstein(s): Cumberbatch, Miller, and the National Theatre

By Talia Vestri

Like Arden, I, too, have been burning with curiosity about the recent critical reactions to several Frankenstein adaptations. But rather than valiantly sacrifice my time to the gods of Hollywood mediocrity as she so nobly does in her last post, I managed to escape the sub-par recreation of I, Frankenstein and instead turned my intrigue towards a much more mainstream and accepted performance: Danny Boyle’s 2011 National Theatre stage production of Frankenstein, featuring the incomparable Jonny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch. Continue reading “More Frankenstein(s): Cumberbatch, Miller, and the National Theatre”

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I Watch I, Frankenstein

This unapologetic lead balloon of a film has created controversy among Romanticists. What gives? I sacrificed myself to find out.
“He’s alive! But you might wish he wasn’t.”
For the last number of months, I’ve been surprised by how often I, Frankenstein has reared its malformed CGI head in discussions about Romanticism. The film, which came out in January 2014 and has a 3% approval rating among critics, seems oddly difficult to dismiss. The film’s “near viral” negative response has resulted in a curious sort of academic Whack-a-Mole, as dismayed scholars continually reject any influence of anything “like this” on their work and teaching. But like any supernatural villain, I, Frankenstein always comes back — and so, it is lamented, the film is bound to make an eventual appearance on some ill-fated undergraduate syllabus. Continue reading “I Watch I, Frankenstein”