5fish
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This link I am posting is a wonkish and short( a page) comparison of Shelly Frankenstein / The Modern Prometheus to slavery in Briton and United States... Its good but your head may explode because it is deep...
http://exhibitions.nypl.org/biblion/outsiders/outsiders/essay/essaymoore
Snippets...
Shelley wrote Frankenstein just as Great Britain was ponderously transitioning from its role as a slave-trading state into the coming upheavals of empire building, the Industrial Revolution, labor unrest, and the struggles for universal suffrage and human rights. Slavery came first up on Britain’s “we shall overcome” list. With the Promethean anti-slavery position in place by 1807 with the passage of the Slave Trade Act, Poems on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, published in London two years later, anticipated Mary Shelley’s Promethean anti-hero by nearly a decade. The volume of poems opens with James Grahame’s “Prometheus Delivered”:
Here...
Globally, many philosophers, politicians, writers, and poets had long taken aim at slavery. Mary Shelley’s husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, believed that slavery was “the deepest stain upon civilized man.” And, for Shelley the poet, it was the philosophers, writers, and poets who must lead the battle against the scourge of slavery; his 1821 manifesto “A Defence of Poetry,” first published posthumously in 1840, concluded, “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
Here...
As the nation marked the inauguration of President Abraham Lincoln, on March 4, 1861, a front-page editorial in the Charleston Mercury pointed to the monster at the President’s door: “He must proclaim peace or declare war. He must virtually recognize the independence of the Confederate States, or encounter them in a conflict of arms.... Like Frankenstein, they have raised a monster which they cannot quell.”
Here... a Black Thought on reconstruction...
For Du Bois, the history of the black experience in America, from slavery through Jim Crow, could be traced to that ancient archetype of struggle against tyranny. Slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow fueled and continuously refueled the struggle for human rights. In Black Reconstruction in America (1935), he warned that we must remember:
“How civil war in the South began again — indeed had never ceased; and how black Prometheus bound to the Rock of Ages by hate, hurt and humiliation, has his vitals eaten out as they grow, yet lives and fights.... Reconstruction was a determined effort to reduce black labor as nearly as possible to a condition of unlimited exploitation and build a new class of capitalists on this foundation.”
It is a deep read...
http://exhibitions.nypl.org/biblion/outsiders/outsiders/essay/essaymoore
http://exhibitions.nypl.org/biblion/outsiders/outsiders/essay/essaymoore
Snippets...
Shelley wrote Frankenstein just as Great Britain was ponderously transitioning from its role as a slave-trading state into the coming upheavals of empire building, the Industrial Revolution, labor unrest, and the struggles for universal suffrage and human rights. Slavery came first up on Britain’s “we shall overcome” list. With the Promethean anti-slavery position in place by 1807 with the passage of the Slave Trade Act, Poems on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, published in London two years later, anticipated Mary Shelley’s Promethean anti-hero by nearly a decade. The volume of poems opens with James Grahame’s “Prometheus Delivered”:
Here...
Globally, many philosophers, politicians, writers, and poets had long taken aim at slavery. Mary Shelley’s husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, believed that slavery was “the deepest stain upon civilized man.” And, for Shelley the poet, it was the philosophers, writers, and poets who must lead the battle against the scourge of slavery; his 1821 manifesto “A Defence of Poetry,” first published posthumously in 1840, concluded, “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
Here...
As the nation marked the inauguration of President Abraham Lincoln, on March 4, 1861, a front-page editorial in the Charleston Mercury pointed to the monster at the President’s door: “He must proclaim peace or declare war. He must virtually recognize the independence of the Confederate States, or encounter them in a conflict of arms.... Like Frankenstein, they have raised a monster which they cannot quell.”
Here... a Black Thought on reconstruction...
For Du Bois, the history of the black experience in America, from slavery through Jim Crow, could be traced to that ancient archetype of struggle against tyranny. Slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow fueled and continuously refueled the struggle for human rights. In Black Reconstruction in America (1935), he warned that we must remember:
“How civil war in the South began again — indeed had never ceased; and how black Prometheus bound to the Rock of Ages by hate, hurt and humiliation, has his vitals eaten out as they grow, yet lives and fights.... Reconstruction was a determined effort to reduce black labor as nearly as possible to a condition of unlimited exploitation and build a new class of capitalists on this foundation.”
It is a deep read...
http://exhibitions.nypl.org/biblion/outsiders/outsiders/essay/essaymoore