York Explore Library :

Tue 6 Nov :

6.30pm – 7.45pm :

£5

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published 200 years ago in 1818, engaged in detail with the scientific culture of its day. Mary Shelley read scientific manuals, attended lectures and read newspaper reports of the latest attempts to uncover the mysteries of electricity, chemistry and medicine, and incorporated that knowledge into her novel. But how does Victor Frankenstein animate his creature? Shelley ensures that Victor’s methods remain a secret, but this talk will explore the hints that she writes into the novel, and compare Shelley’s text with cinematic adaptations, which offer much more explicit and spectacular accounts of the creature’s animation.

Author’s Biography:
Dr Mary Fairclough is a lecturer in English and Related Literature at the University of York. Her research interests lie in the intersection between literature, politics and science in the long eighteenth-century. She teaches an MA module entitled Literature, Medicine & Revolution: Electricity from Franklin to Frankenstein.

Please visit our ticketing website to book a place.