«SOGNI E FAVOLE IO FINGO». SULLA GENESI DEL «FRANKENSTEIN» DI MARY SHELLEY

Abstract

During the summer of 1797, the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, according to what he declared, experienced, while sleeping, a vision inspiring him a poem of about three hundred lines: what he partially managed to transcribe, of that dream of poetry, is one of the most perfect examples of musicality in the English language. It is with Romanticism that dreams, removed from the bonds of foretelling and of the naïve inferences of folklore, become generators of images, and also of words. Dreams indicated peculiar themes to Füssli’s art, suggested novel plots to Stevenson and Dostoevskij, and, even before them, in 1818 they presented Mary Shelley, as she travelled towards Italy, with the subject of a new, immortal, story - the one of the scientist Frankenstein, who decides to play God in his power of giving life -, which is still haunting us nowadays.