November 5

In creating the timeline I had a little more trouble than I anticipated.  I'm not sure what exactly I was thinking.   Hopefully it will come together.  Not having a great deal of luck with encyclopedias, I have begun using critical materials to put together my own chronology and this expansion of the timeline will take place of the biographies I think.  We'll see how much time I have.

For Frankenstein, I began going through different anthologies and putting together a rough perspective from their biographical information.  I also used The Sign of Angellica:  Women Writing and Fiction, 1660-1800 (Janet Todd, Columbia University Press, New York: 1989) and the introduction to the 1818 text, edited by D.L. Macdonald & Kathleen Scherf (Broadview Press Ltd.,1996).  I don't think I will ever get tired of this book, there are so many different aspects to explore.  I have not been sure of how to address modern criticism, particularly post-colonial;  we'll see if I think of something.  I am so insecure about the summaries, I feel I could write them all a thousand times and never get them right, but what struck me when I was writing Frankenstein, the first one, was the slippage between the grotesque (a term with so many different definitions that I use it loosely having not settled on one yet myself) and the creator of the environment that brought about the grotesque.  With Frankenstein this can be seen most clearly, where many Americans do not even differentiate between the two, it seems to be a Jeckyl-Hyde relationship.  When I go back through the summaries I think this may be a guiding principle, I hope it comes across.