Pre-AP Summer Reading

Reading…

It will enhance your vocabulary…

…and help make you a better writer

… critically thinking about what you’re reading can also help improve your writing. It’s important not just to read, but analyze the selection itself including its meaning, themes and ultimate message.

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, chapter 5, Victor Frankenstein quotes the lines, “Like one, that on a lonesome road / Doth walk in fear and dread / And, having once turned round, walks on / And turns no more his head / Because he knows a frightful fiend / Doth close behind him tread” (Penguin Popular Classic 1968 page 57, cited from Rime, 1817 edition). In the book’s opening letters from Robert Walton to his sister, specifically Letter II, Walton explicitly mentions the poem by name and claims he “shall kill no albatross” on his journey.

Romantic Era: Samuel Taylor Coleridge – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Lecture)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 626-line tale of a cursed sailor’s sin and redemption is a lot to take in, I soon discovered, if you haven’t read it before. Luckily, bass player Steve Harris’s lyrics provide a pretty straightforward summary, and the music—shifting from shouted lyrics and frantic guitars as Death descends on the mariner’s ship, to a spooky, atmospheric section that recalls a glassy sea—helps to dramatize the mariner’s story. Heavy metal and Romantic poetry might seem like an unlikely combination, but the noise, the drama, and the driving beat of Iron Maiden’s interpretation feel right for Coleridge’s horror story—most of all because they capture the urgency of a curse that forces the mariner to tell his tale, as the song repeatedly puts it, “on and on and on.”

Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is both a frightening Gothic horror story and a science fiction masterpiece. Most people will be surprised to learn that Frankenstein is actually the very first example of science fiction ever written. As Gothic horror it is a cautionary tale of the limits of man and science and reminds us of what happens when mankind moves forward with hubris as its motivating force.

The full title of the novel is Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus. In the ancient myth, Prometheus creates man from clay then steals fire from the Gods so that his creation can be more godlike. Victor Frankenstein, in a similar way, trespasses on what should be God’s role when he created the Monster. Prometheus was continuously punished for his actions in the same way that both Victor and the Monster live lives of torment. Mary Shelley’s good friend Lord Byron published a poem called Prometheus shortly before she began work on her story and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley later wrote a poem called Prometheus Unbound.

Form, structure and language are the building blocks of any narrative and in Frankenstein Mary Shelley uses all of these with a skill beyond her years:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/guides/zxtnfg8/revision/1

Making a “monster”: an introduction to Frankenstein

Click to access Mellor-MakingaMonster.pdf

AP Lit Sample

Click to access 203036.pdf

Full Text (Click: Table of Contents)

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/shelley/mary/s53f/

Queen’s CDS: Who is Frankenstein?