Session 17 Discussion Questions
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Questions for Discussion
- What similarities/differences do you notice between the first generation of British Romantics (Mary Wollstonecraft, Burke, Godwin, Blake) and the second generation of British Romantics (Fanny Imlay Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, Claire Clairmont, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Margaret King (a.k.a. Lady Mount Cashell/Mrs. Mason)? How does life influence art, and vice versa, in each generation?
- How does the second generation of British Romantics respond to, and appropriate, the ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft?
- How does the appropriation of Wollstonecraft by the second generation of British Romantics influence the reception of Wollstonecraft by later generations of literary, political, and feminist writers?
- How and where was the story of Frankenstein “conceived,” according to Mary Shelley and John Polidori? How is the setting (natural, historical, psychological) of its literary conception illustrative of broader themes/patterns in British Romanticism? What other Romantic works are “born” out of this setting, alongside Frankenstein?
- How does Mary Shelley portray stories and story-telling in her 1831 introduction to Frankenstein? How does Shelley’s account of story-telling relate to her mother’s use of stories in her literary and philosophical works?
2008,
by the Contributing Authors.
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Botting, E. (2008, December 03). Session 17 Discussion Questions. Retrieved February 12, 2012, from Notre Dame OpenCourseWare Web site: http://ocw.nd.edu/political-science/mary-wollstonecraft-and-mary-shelley/discussion-questions/session-17-discussion-questions.
