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Comparative Analysis of the Portrayal of Frankenstein's Creature on Film
Alechina, Yana ; Horová, Miroslava (advisor) ; Poncarová, Petra Johana (referee)
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus was first published in 1818. Almost a century later, in 1910, in the early days of the cinematograph, Frankenstein's Creature appeared in black and white on the silver screen for the first time in Thomas Edison's experimental production directed by J. Searle Dawley. Since then, a plethora of film and television adaptations have been created. The goal of this thesis is to compare and analyse how Frankenstein's Creature, or, increasingly, the Frankenstein monster, was portrayed in these adaptations, paying attention primarily to the intelligence of the monster. The aim is to discover how and why the Creature, who is described in the book as an intelligent being capable of thinking, feeling, reading and speaking, is transformed in some adaptations into a senseless brutal monstrosity. The thesis will also discuss the effect of this transposition on the overall atmosphere, genre and meaning of the individual adaptations and the related problems of the novel's popular cultural legacy. The analysis of the adaptations which are closer to the original vision of the novel will serve as key material for comparison. The analysis of the different representations of the Creature throughout various adaptations will additionally allow to determine some of the...
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Haunted by the New Woman
Farniková, Hana ; Wallace, Clare (advisor) ; Horová, Miroslava (referee)
(EN) The transformation of gender is one of the fundamental topics of the late Victorian Gothic. While the earlier Gothic contended with representing a woman as either a victim or a monster, the appearance of the ambiguous New Woman, the journalistic phenomenon that became both the proto-feministic ideal and the conservative counter-ideal, prompted the creation of sympathetic monsters desiring independence. The Gothic alters the strategies of survival, punishing those who stray from social, political, and moral norms. In this way, the Gothic genre not only reacts to cultural ideals and counter-ideals, but it also arouses feelings and challenges readers' preconceptions. The thesis explores relations between figures of monstrous women and the gender ideal dominant at the fin-de-siècle. The female vampire is connected to the qualities commonly associated with the New Woman like promiscuity, hateful behaviour towards children, and yearning for freedom from the shackles of patriarchal society. Though these uncontrollable female fiends are then reduced to the ideal of a dead woman who no longer has any control over her narrative, they return as ghosts, further muddling the lines between traditional feminine and masculine qualities. A possessed woman may behave in a masculine way; a man tortured by a...
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"A Great Secret Bias": Mapping Bisexuality in Eighteenth-Century Literature.
Cherkasova, Anastasiia ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor) ; Horová, Miroslava (referee)
The research will focus on the depiction of bisexuality in 18th century literature. Despite being one of the important categories in the contemporary Queer Discourse, bisexuality still seems to be overlooked in today's cultural scene or criticized for being too ambiguous or unclear. This is prominently featured in some novels that are today considered as being involved with the depictions of homoerotic relations, even though many of them might be in a more nuanced reading described as dealing with more complex, even bisexual connections. The thesis aims to trace back bisexuality and show its omnipresence in 18th -century literature, the time period when nonstandard sexual identities started to acquire visibility. Such reading might shed some light on the nature of sexuality, which is fluid, polymorphous and complex, instead of being regarded as fixed and defined. The thesis encompasses the groundbreaking theories of Michel Foucault and other theorists, however, it has as its aim the expansion of this framework and inclusion of the still very intangible phenomenon of bisexuality. Maria Edgeworth's novel Belinda, John Cleland's erotic novel Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure as well as Charlotte Charke's A Narrative Of The Life Of Mrs. Charlotte Charke will be the template on which the...
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Gender in Selected British Twentieth-Century Dystopian Novels
Čalkovská, Markéta ; Poncarová, Petra Johana (advisor) ; Horová, Miroslava (referee)
This thesis explores the topic of gender in selected British dystopian novels from first half and middle of the 20th century - Lord of the Flies (1954) by William Golding, Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley, and Swastika Night (1937) by Katharine Burdekin, through the lens of gender and feminist approaches. The theoretical part briefly summarizes the history of the dystopian and utopian genres as well as their connection to feminist critique. It also summarises the focus of feminist literary studies and gender studies lens and describes the main works of reference used in this thesis. The latter part focuses on the hierarchy and layout of dystopian societies described in the individual novels and analyses the established ideology and its values regarding gender roles and gender-coded behaviour. These values include the position and autonomy of women and their reproductive rights and duties in Brave New World and Swastika Night or the rejection of the feminine in Lord of the Flies and its impact on the outcome of the novel. It also examines individual characters and their acceptance of or disagreement with the values imposed by society and its influence on the plot. Concepts such as toxic masculinity, patriarchal society, objectification, and gender performativity are also examined.
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The Romantic Prometheus: Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein", P. B. Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound" and Lord Byron's "Manfred".
Hupcejová, Anna ; Horová, Miroslava (advisor) ; Beran, Zdeněk (referee)
Following the time of political turmoil and social change sweeping through Europe (the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the Industrial Revolution), the mythological figure of Prometheus was especially popular in English Romantic literature. The Promethean symbol and values of liberty and defiance were evident inspirations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound and George Gordon Byron's Manfred. Being generally interested in English Romantic literature, I seek to discuss in what ways and to what extent have the Romantics rewritten the themes associated with the Titan for the purposes of modernity. Prometheus' chief characteristics are his caring and self-sacrificing, yet rebellious and cunning nature - he is in short an individual that the Romantics could relate to, also because he suffered for his beliefs and was mentally strong enough to stand up against the Olympian authorities. His name translates as 'forethought' or 'foresight' and this is without doubt connected to why the Romantics found him relevant to their time. There are a few issues that will need to be confronted. First of all, there are countless versions of the ancient myth, so instead I will direct my attention to the values and symbols associated with Prometheus. Secondly, there are also other...
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Lord Byron's tragicomic muse: exploring the theme of stigmatization in Manfred, Cain and Heaven and Earth
Horová, Miroslava ; Procházka, Martin (advisor) ; Beran, Zdeněk (referee)
The general public image of Lord Byron (in)famously amounts to a set of gilded platitudes - the Romantic sex-symbol, the lover of women, men, wine and freedom, the revolutionary suffering the premature death of a true hero - all adding up to constitute the notorious notion of a celebrity, anchored in the melodrama of an exotic life with a tragic end. In short, ever since the phenomenal success of the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in 1812, the poet has been distilled into a rather appetizing cocktail of hyperbole, originating in the theretofore unprecedented cult of personality epitomized by sheer stylishness and daunting eroticism. Thus in the long run, as far as the laity is concerned, we inevitably see Lord Byron join the catalogue of ill-famed idols featuring the disparate likes of John Wilmot or James Dean. Moreover, the scandalous momentum of the poet's life has continuously been pushing the oeuvre into a shameful shade, the consequence of which being that Byron's work is largely perceived as merely echoing, in fateful chimes, the biographical bane of incest, debauchery, intolerable cruelty in matrimony etcetera - the allegedly numerous moral trespasses eventually resulting in a dramatic fall from grace and exile. Stereotypes conjured out ofthe bog of Byron's life stifle the voices of...
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The Ideal of Beauty in the Period of Romanticism
Páchová, Kateřina ; Procházka, Martin (advisor) ; Horová, Miroslava (referee)
(in English): The aim of the thesis is to study the ideal of beauty in the period of Romanticism. The study is based on a close analysis of one of the crucial texts of the Romantic period - the Lyrical Ballads written by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The thesis is concerned with the vision of the beautiful in relation to the aesthetics of the sublime. It focuses on the development of what was perceived as beautiful in the periods preceding Romanticism and how this vision changed for the Romantics. The question is what is the ideal of beauty in the period of Romanticism and how it is presented in the Lyrical Ballads? Is there a common ideal for Wordsworth and Coleridge, or do they differ in their notion of the beautiful? The main focus of the thesis is the discrepancy between the beautiful, on one hand, and the sublime or the grotesque, on the other, both in perceiving the nature and human beings. The Romantics have several similar features as well as the vision of the beautiful, whether they praise women or men or nature, whether they deal with the beauty inside or the surface. Similarities between those are considered as well. The reflexion of aesthetics of the beautiful and the sublime is drawn primarily from Edmund Burke's The Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas...
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William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet on Screen
Rösslerová, Eva ; Nováková, Soňa (advisor) ; Horová, Miroslava (referee)
THESIS ABSTRACT The aim of the thesis is to explore the film adaptations of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and to compare their thematic shifts of the adapted text. Primary focus will be put on Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968), Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996), and Carlo Carlei's Romeo & Juliet (2013). This choice does not entirely exclude other adaptations, as they will be alluded to whenever some of their features become relevant to the discussion at hand. The thesis is based on my reading of this tragedy and supplemented by secondary sources. It analyses three themes of the play, and subsequent adaptation issues, in order to introduce and compare the individual directors' readings of these particular instances and their overall narrative strategies applied in the films. The impact of the various renditions of the themes will be compared and examined in terms of its influence on the audience's perception of the plot. Currently, many people experience Shakespeare's plays trough film and it is productive to examine what perceptions of the plays they form when encountering the playwright in this re-created manner. Some of the questions that this analysis will address are: What visual means do the directors employ to establish new dimension to the adapted text? What is transmitted...
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Space and its connection to characters in Thomas Hardy's novels
Šejvlová, Kristýna ; Beran, Zdeněk (advisor) ; Horová, Miroslava (referee)
When preparing the first edition of his collected works, Thomas Hardy included his major novels in a group called "Novels of Character and Environment", which clearly indicates that he saw a fundamental link between people and the place they occupy. This thesis explores the connection between space, in this broader sense, and characters, and why the setting is of great importance to the story itself. For this purpose, I have chosen three novels by Thomas Hardy: Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native and Tess of the d'Urbervilles which I analyzed along with the places Hardy chose to determine the fates of his characters. This special determinism seems to lock characters in their fates, making it impossible for them to escape their social classes, the prejudices they stick to and the setting they are born (or borne) into, and how due to this concept of determinism some characters are destined to fail from the very beginning. This thesis consists of five parts. The Introduction and chapter about Hardy's fictional space Wessex, define what role space plays in the process of reading, and how Hardy exploits its features in modelling his own specific space. I have decided to list the novels in the chronological order in which they were published, since it mirrors Hardy's development both of...
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'You Seemed the Goddess Incarnate': Echoes of Greek Mythology in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood
Netolická, Anna ; Horová, Miroslava (advisor) ; Nováková, Soňa (referee)
The thesis aims to analyse the echoes of chosen aspects of Greek mythology in Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, which are still being largely omitted by the academy. Mythological narrative in this work serves as a key to unravelling a variety of thematic layers of the book and offers new insight into the behaviour of the characters and their psychology, specifically concerning sexuality and gender as main topics of the book. The first chapter deals with concise contextualization of sexuality in the 20th century with a peek into ancient Greece. The second chapter focuses on juxtaposing the archetypes of gods with the characters of Nightwood. First it focuses on Robin Vote and her relationships that are contrasted to the myth of Demeter and Persephone, while discussion in greater detail is then dedicated to the union between Robin and Nora Flood, which reflects a subversive mother-daughter relationship dynamic. Further, the chapter explores the juxtaposition of deities and mythological characters that evince signs of gender fluidity - Tiresias and Agdistis - with Doctor Matthew O'Connor and Robin; the thesis will also touch upon a comparison to the gender-iconic deities Artemis and Aphroditos. The last chapter discusses metamorphoses, a phenomenon typical for Greek deities and mythological characters,...
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