The cover for Clairmont and Claire Clairmont, by Amelia Curran (1819).
Hachette/Wiki Commons
She has largely been airbrushed from history, but a new novel seeks to make Claire Clairmont visible by imagining her life after Byron.
Asking if computers will be more intelligent than humans distracts us from grasping the underlying ethical problem with the humans who create and use them.
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Humanity is the only species on earth for whom intelligence is also an ethical liability.
An etching of a Royal Institution lecture by James Gillray (1802). Davy is on the right, holding the bellows.
Science History Images/Alamy Stock Photo
Davy’s famous lectures on the animating power of electricity may have inspired a young Mary Shelley as she came up with the idea for Frankenstein.
Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster.
The possibilities of ‘more human than human’ artificial intelligence and the dangers of playing God and are not new – they’re the subjects of one of the world’s first science-fiction novels.
Anne, Emily, and Charlotte Brontë, by their brother Branwell (c. 1834).
National Portrait Gallery, London
New research shows that literary relatives tend to share a similar writing style.
‘Dark Souls’ is set in Lordran, a fantasy version of a mythologized medieval Europe.
(Bandai Namco)
‘Dark Souls’ draws on the literary theme of the ‘last man’ that emerged from the work of French author Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville and those inspired by him.
Wikimedia Commons
What would happen if plague destroyed all of humanity? Mary Shelley’s 1826 book suggests Earth would be better off.
A military guard of honour wear face masks against the spread of the coronavirus by the Unknown Soldier’s Tomb in Warsaw, Poland.
(AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)
From cholera outbreaks to public health actions, war metaphors have long been used to describe diseases, to show what we fear and to explain our world to ourselves.
‘Frankenstein’ is traditionally read as a critique of science — but also portrays many forms of imprisonment.
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In the project Erasing Frankenstein, students, educators and incarcerated women collaborated to created an erasure poem of Mary Shelley’s classic text, and publicly showcase their work.
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It’s not just a modern fad – plant-based diets have a long and colourful political past.
The Nightmare by John Henry Fuseli.
Detroit Institute of Arts
Written in the same house party as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Polidori’s creature was based on the “mad, bad and dangerous to know” Lord Byron.
Frontispiece from the original German version of Fantasmagoriana.
Schnorr von Carolsfeld
The story of how Mary Shelley dreamed up Frankenstein is famous. Less well-known, however, is the reading material that inspired her to write.
Giovanni Aldini’s experiments with a human corpse.
Wellcome Collection
Frankenstein might look like fantasy to modern eyes, but to its author and original readers there was nothing fantastic about it.
Frankenstein’s monster in the Hollywood Wax Museum. The fictional character first appeared in Mary Shelley’s novel in 1818.
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By showing us a world from which mothers are largely absent, Mary Shelley reminds us that the genius of motherhood lies less in biological reproduction than in the capacity to love.
Pixabay/Universal Pictures
Written by a teenager, Frankenstein is an extraordinary novel that still endures 200 years after its first publication.
Victor Frankenstein’s mistakes serve as cautionary lessons.
Etienne Marais/Pexels
If Mary Shelley wrote the book today, Victor would surely be a synthetic biologist. But those fiddling with living things in 2018 have hopefully learned from her cautionary tale.
The frontispiece to the 1831 Frankenstein by Theodor von Holst, one of the first two illustrations for the novel.
Tate Britain. Private collection, Bath.
On its 200th anniversary, why is it a surprise that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein at such a young age – just because she’s a woman?
frankenstein.
Mary Shelley’s novel asked questions about the human condition that are more relevant today than ever.
Jean-Luc via Wikimedia Commons
The singer had Romantic notions in common with the poet – as well as with William Blake, Mary Shelley, and John Keats.