ShmoopTube

Where Monty Python meets your 10th grade teacher.

Search Thousands of Shmoop Videos


British Literature Videos 176 videos

A Tale of Two Cities Summary
75855 Views

Meet Charles Darnay, the nobleman who spends more time on trial and in prison than attending balls and drinking expensive wine. Don't feel too bad...

Beowulf
113087 Views

Written in Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, sometime between the 8th and 11th centuries, Beowulf is an epic poem that reflects the early medieval warri...

Brave New World
79220 Views

Brave New World is supposed be an exciting book about a negative utopia and the corrupt powers of authority. So where’s the big car chase? What's...

See All

ELA 12: 1.18 Monster Mash 113 Views


Share It!


Description:

We wonder if Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin knew that her campfire story would still be inspiring fear in the hearts of literature-dreading students hundreds of years later...

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:04

Frankenstein's monster is one of the most famous monsters out [Frankenstein's monsters face]

00:07

there we recognize that green skin bolt neck blunk anywhere but Frankenstein's

00:12

monster didn't just pop into existence out of nowhere and that's good because [Frankenstein's monster appears beside a sign of welcome to nowhere]

00:15

if that was the case well it'd make showers alot scarier well the story of Frankenstein

00:20

starts all the way back in the summer of 1816 Mary Wollstonecraft Goodwin was

00:26

hanging out in a swiss lake house with her lover and future husband Percy [Mary and Percy outside a lake house]

00:31

Shelley, Lord Byron John Polidori yeah and some other less famous people

00:36

were there too all right well during the vacation Lord Byron challenged everyone

00:39

to come up with the scariest freakiest spookiest story they could and since [Lord Byron challenging everyone to come up with a scary story over a campfire]

00:43

this was 1816 it couldn't just be a story about a weak Wi-Fi signal that

00:47

kept getting lost then mysteriously coming back then even more mysteriously [WiFi losing signal on a macbook screen]

00:52

getting lost again ooh.. well Goodwin came up with something even

00:57

better than all that the foundations of what would eventually become [Green Frankenstein's monster appears and boy runs out of room]

01:00

Frankenstein or the modern prometheus once she had the idea there was still

01:06

the matter of writing it like most novels of the era Frankenstein is an

01:10

epistle that is a literary work written as a letter or as a series of letters [epistle definition]

01:15

and this wasn't exactly revolutionary many early English novels were

01:19

epistolary some like Dracula were supposedly a whole bunch of letters [Dracula boook with letters leaking out]

01:23

while others had a narrative frame presented as though they were a diary or

01:28

journal that someone just happened to stumble upon and then just happened to

01:33

send to a publisher so made thousands of copies and a sort of thing anyone with a [Jim's diary sent to a publisher and thousands of books appear]

01:37

private diary would be just fine to it yeah anywho Frankenstein is told through

01:42

letters and Goodwin was not the least bit afraid of setting up lots and lots

01:46

of narrative layers at one point captain Walton records Victor Frankenstein

01:51

quoting the monster telling the De Lacey story making for a whopping four [4 layers of narrative layers]

01:56

layers of narrative if you need to lie down after that we don't blame you [boy thinking about taking a nap]

01:59

Frankenstein's not only epistlary but it also adopted one of the new

02:04

novelistic forms that was sweeping the first half of the 19th century the

02:08

three-volume novel or triple decker we hope one of those layers has bacon one of the [Three books titled Fran-Ken-Stein]

02:14

main structural innovations of the three-volume novel was the cliffhanger

02:18

since they always had a couple of volume breaks there was extra reason to amp up [man hanging off the edge of a cliff]

02:22

the suspense so there you have it a bit more background information on

02:26

Frankenstein's monster and still that doesn't make you want to take a shower with them [Frankenstein's monster chasing a man wearing a towel]

Related Videos

A Tale of Two Cities Summary
75855 Views

Meet Charles Darnay, the nobleman who spends more time on trial and in prison than attending balls and drinking expensive wine. Don't feel too bad...

Beowulf
113087 Views

Written in Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, sometime between the 8th and 11th centuries, Beowulf is an epic poem that reflects the early medieval warri...

Brave New World
79220 Views

Brave New World is supposed be an exciting book about a negative utopia and the corrupt powers of authority. So where’s the big car chase? What's...

Dracula
27346 Views

What is Dracula really about? Just Count Dracula? Or is there more to it than vampires? This video addresses some major ideas in Bram Stoker’s cl...

Dracula: Father of the Modern Vampire
17555 Views

There are plenty of famous vampires that send chills up our spines, but Dracula was and still is the king of them all. No one else can touch him. N...