| Abstrakt: |
The following essay tries to analyze some of the spaces and places of the fantastic in Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley, focusing on Romolo Runcini's literary and cultural perspective (this essay is essentially dedicated to him, nine years after his death as both a scholar and my guiding light during my studies at and after my university years) and the newest essays by Patricia García and Robert T. Tally Jr. The fantastic designates the incursion of an unrealistic element in a realistic frame. Such a dialectic realizes a transgression that provokes estrangement, apprehension, anxiety, fear; in a word, the uncanny. These ex-centric, marginal, liminal spaces and places push the characters as well as the readers towards an alternative, dangerous, excessive, scandalous, rebellious way of seeing the world. The familiar houses, streets, mountains, and towns, and particularly the laboratory, the Pole, and the body of the monster itself become the scene of a demonic, fascinating, awful metamorphosis that leads to inspect what lies beyond the border, or limit of what is socially allowed teaching us that to transgress also implies awareness, creativity, and rebirth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
