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Franken-con

A selective lexicon from Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein
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Compiled by Caitlyn Hartung
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About the Author

Born in August of 1797 to Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, Mary Shelley is best known as being the author of Frankenstein. Mary met the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1812 and eloped with him to France in July 1814. The couple were married in 1816, after Shelley’s first wife had committed suicide. Mary and Percy had one child together, Percy Florence Shelley, before her husband died in 1822. 

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Shelley documents how Frankenstein came to be in the introduction of the 1831 edition of the book. In the gloomy summer of 1816, Percy Shelley and then-Mary Wollstonecraft went on holiday in Geneva, where they were neighbors with Lord Byron, another author of the Romantic period. Lord Byron suggested that each person write a ghost story as a competition, the winner chosen as the one who wrote the most terrifying tale. Sometime in the next few weeks, Mary would write a short story that, with the encouragement of Percy Shelley, would eventually become Frankenstein. 

 

Shelley wrote several works other than Frankenstein in her life, including Valperga (1823), The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837), yet her debut novel is what has captivated the world for over two centuries.

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Mary Shelley died in 1851 at the age of 53, yet Frankenstein remains a timeless classic, inspiring films, novels, and spin-offs of the original work. It is widely thought that Mary Shelley is the one of the earliest creators of the science fiction and horror genres.

About the Project

This project is the culmination of months of work, and created for the BYU English Language course "Late Modern English", taught by Professor Cynthia Hallen. Using dictionaries that Mary Shelley would have been accustomed to in 1818, when Frankenstein was written, this selective lexicon can be used to help aid translations of future printings of Frankenstein, giving the context of the time and language used during the Romantics period.  

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Each entry is complete with etymologies and examples from the text, with the citations included. If a word had multiple parts of speech, multiple entries were made to distinguish between uses.

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This lexicon is made by an undergraduate student, and thus is likely to contain errors that would not be seen on an official lexicon. This project is meant to be an introduction to the world of lexicography, and to gain an appreciation to the work that goes into making a dictionary.

© 2020 by Caitlyn Hartung. Proudly created with Wix.com

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