Know Your English Literature Part. II

Frankenstein: Gothic novel by Mary Shelly, wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, published in 1818. The title character, Dr. Victor Frankenstein, makes a man like monster from parts of corpses, and brings it to life by electricity. Horrible to look at but capable of human emotion, the creature is eaten up by loneliness and begs for a mate. When Frankenstein refuses, it unleashes vengeance.

· The monster itself is often incorrectly referred to as Frankenstein.

Gulliver’s Travels: Satire on human folly by Jonathan Swift published in 1726. Lemuel Gulliver is shipwrecked on the island of Lilliput, where the inhabitants are just six inches tall but take themselves and their petty squabbles very seriously- a satire on contemporary English politics and self importance. Gulliver then travels to Brobdingnag, a land of giants, and to Laputa where the professors are so involved with projects such as extraction sunshine from cucumbers that practical matters are quiet forgotten. His last encounters are with noble, intelligent horses called Houyhnhnms and brutish, degraded men called Yahoos. Gulliver finally returns home and finds him unable to tolerate even his own family.

‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’: First line of one of William Wordsworth’s best known poems. Wordsworth did not give the poem a title, but it is often referred to as ‘Daffodils’. It begins:

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high, o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils.