Gothic Romance - Hardcover

Emmanuel Carrere

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684191997 ISBN 13: 9780684191997

Publisher: Scribner, 1990

Synopsis

Based on the events that inspired Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," this work intertwines parallel stories of suspense set in early nineteenth-century London

About this title

Language Notes:

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

From Publishers Weekly:

An allusive and contrived retelling of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and the circumstances of its composition--when the Shelleys, Byron, and his mad young medic "poor Polidori" lived abroad and traded ghost stories--this novel shuttles to and fro in time as if an intertextual exercise. It opens with the embittered addict Polidori living in squalor with a prostitute and claiming that Shelley stole his ideas for her story while his own tale, The Vampire , has been slighted. In a suicidal overdose, he imagines himself drenched on the deck of a sinking ship. The scene shifts to contemporary London, where the ship's captain, Robert Walton (the Arctic explorer in Shelley's novel, to whom the marooned Dr. Frankenstein described his monstrous creation), is now a publisher of romances. He telephones tips to his bevy of authors, notably one named Ann, whose adventures reveal the evolution of romantic myth, e.g., Frankenstein, seen today as a construct of psychoanalysts, biographers, storytellers, filmmakers, and scholars. Written before Carrere's lauded The Mustache , this piece of literary gamesmanship will appeal most to readers concerned with narrative as a puzzle and a process.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0684191997
• ISBN 13: 9780684191997
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 307