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comment by _refugee_
_refugee_  ·  3530 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What are you reading? Is it any good?

WHO WANTS TO HEAR ALL ABOUT HOW THERE'S A BIG SECRET (AKA NO ONE ELSE CARES) LITERATURE CONTROVERSY AS TO WHO REALLY WROTE FRANKENSTEIN?

Seriously, one of my favorite undergraduate professors literally wrote the books about Frankenstein - he's convinced she really wrote it, and of course, as his student (he also taught my mother in undergrad) I agree, but there's this dillweed out there named John Lauritsen who's convinced that M. Shelly didn't write the book essentially because "a woman couldn't write it." If you're into literature, it's pretty fascinating. Lauritsen blows up the romantics list-serv about once a year clamoring on about how "clearly Percy Shelly wrote Frankenstein for his wife" and so on.





galen  ·  3529 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Meh, that sounds like those arguments about whether Shakespeare was really Shakespeare. You know, "a poorish person couldn't be the greatest playwright of all time, clearly it was secretly a member of the nobility."

user-inactivated  ·  3524 days ago  ·  link  ·  

There's a tad more to the argument than that, but don't let that get in the way of your bitter anti-classicism.

In all seriousness, Bryson wrote a damn fine book about Shakespeare that talks about the controversy. The conclusion is basically, we'll never know for sure: almost certainly the Bard wrote >90% of his plays, but it is equally almost 100% likely that a couple of the lesser-known ones aren't really his. The shaky attribution thing was common at the time for various industry reasons.

The nuts who say it was Bacon or whatever are just nuts.

galen  ·  3524 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    bitter anti-classicism.

Whoa whoa whoa, I am a staunch pro-classicist. Shakespeare, Milton, Dante-- you name it.

Classism, on the other hand... :P

user-inactivated  ·  3524 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Oops.