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Frankenstein is the title character in Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, the prototypical "mad scientist" who creates a monster by which he is eventually killed. The name Frankenstein has become popularly attached to the creature itself, who has become the best-known monster in the history of film.
English Romantic novelist best known as the author of Frankenstein. She was the only daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstoncraft Godwin. She met the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in the spring of 1814 and went with him to France in July of that year. The couple were married in 1816, after Shelley's first wife had committed suicide.
After her husband's death in 1822, she returned to England and devoted herself to publicizing Shelley's writings and to educating their only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley. She published her late husband's Posthumous Poems (1824),and she also edited his Poetical Works (1839).
An English Romantic poet whose passionate search for personal love and social justice was gradually channelled from overt actions into poems that rank with the greatest in the English language. Expelled from Oxford University for atheism, fought all his life against religion and for political freedom.
Lord Byron, the English poet, was born in 1788. He became the symbol of Romanticism and political liberalism throughout Europe in the 19th century. He left England in 1816, spending most of his later life in Italy. He engaged in Italian revolutionary politics and sailed for Greece in 1823 to further the greek struggle for indipendence, but died of fever at Missolonghi in 1824. He is remembered for his lyrics, and as the "patron saint" of Romantic liberalism.
A gothic novel is a story of terror and suspence, usually set in gloomy haunted castles, monasteries or graveyards. The vogue for the gothic novel in Britain lasted from the publication of Horace Walpole's The Castle or Otranto (1765) to the 1820s. Gothic novels had the following features in common: elements of horror, the supernatural, gothic ruins or castles full of secret passages and hiding places, ghost, demons, atmosphere of mistery, nature upset by terrible storms and hurricanes.
SCIENCE FICTION
A science fiction story is a story which explores the probable consequences of some improbable or impossible transformation of the basic conditions of human existence. This transformation need not be a technological invention, but may be some mutation of known biological or physical reality: artificial or extraterrestrial lifeforms and travel through time are favourite subjects. Although Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is considered to be the first science fiction novel, true modern science fiction begins with Verne's Voyage au centre de la terre (1864) and Wells's The Time Machine (1895). Science fiction gained greater respect from the 1950s, as writers like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and John Wyndham expanded its range; themes of alien invasion and brain-washing became especially popular during the Cold War. Science fiction is also popular in the cinema: notable films include Lang's Metropolis (1927), Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Star Wars (1977) and its sequels, Alien (1979) and its sequels, Bladerunner (1983), and Indipendence Day (1996). Many science fiction television series have been extremely successful and the genre has also inspired video games, plays, and musicals.