Novels – Page 6 – Interesting Literature

Frankenstein: The Most Misread Novel?

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Let us start with the basics: there is a world of difference between Mary Shelley’s original 1818 novel Frankenstein and the countless films that have been inspired by it. Even Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 adaptation, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, adds much to Shelley’s original vision and in doing so takes much away. Its title may signal fidelity to the original, but it ends up performing a hatchet-job on Shelley’s book, and is led to desperate attempts to stitch together the disparate pieces to form a coherent, and living, whole.

Literature and Sex

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

In one sense, ‘sex’ didn’t exist until 1899, when H. G. Wells first used it in his novel Love and Mr Lewisham as an abbreviation for ‘sexual intercourse’ (and Wells would know: his string of lovers was long and illustrious, including the feminist writer Rebecca West and the modernist pioneer Dorothy Richardson).

Origins of Gothic Literature

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The 1760s was the decade of literary forgeries. One of the most famous forgeries which that decade produced, Horace Walpole’s 1764 book The Castle of Otranto, was responsible for founding the Gothic novel genre. Walpole, who was the son of the first de facto Prime Minister of Britain, Robert Walpole, claimed the story was a genuine medieval manuscript which had recently been discovered and translated. The literary world flocked to buy this exciting new book.