Frankenstein
Read the book Frankenstein, write 4 pages analysis, demonstrating a thorough, critical understanding of the chosen primary source (Frankenstein), and making good use of a minimum of 4 good secondary sources (history, biography, literary criticism—other texts which help you understand and respond to the primary source).
Your goal: you’re trying to identify how the conventions of Gothic fiction interact with other thematic, ideological, and/or symbolic functions of the narrative. That is: what makes the text Gothic? What does the Gothic form allow writers to explore, and readers to experience (explicitly or implicitly, consciously or unconsciously)?
Critical analysis of the Gothic sub-genre has identified a few possibilities you might want to pursue:
• the use of space/location as expressions of literal and figurative oppressive power (esp. sexual, racial, and class oppression)
• the role of religion/superstition
• the effect of the sublime and the Romantic tension between beauty and terror
• the moral and physical jeopardy of the heroine
• the role of place, time (the past), and conflict in expressing nationalist ambitious or anxieties
• xenophobia, fear of racial contamination
• anxiety about social change (race, class, gender, culture)
• fear of new technology and the limits of scientific knowledge/power
