Reanimation Galvanism

Michael Faraday

1839 · 19th Century · Essays

Experimental Researches in Electricity gathers the numbered papers that Michael Faraday read to the Royal Society and printed in its Philosophical Transactions, in which he discovered electromagnetic induction, showed that all kinds of electricity are one, and found the quantitative laws of electrolysis. Volume 1, first published in London in 1839, collects the first fourteen Series, written between 1831 and 1838, in 1,748 numbered paragraphs, with a preface, an index and plates; the library text is the 1849 second edition reprint.

Mary Shelley

1818 (revised 1831) · 19th Century · Novel

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a frame narrative told through the letters of Robert Walton, an English explorer whose ship is trapped in Arctic ice. Walton rescues a dying stranger, Victor Frankenstein, who has been pursuing a gigantic figure across the frozen sea, and who tells his story as a warning to a man whose ambition resembles his own.

Ovid

8 CE · Ancient · Epic

The Metamorphoses is a Latin poem in fifteen books of dactylic hexameter, about 12,000 lines, that strings together some 250 myths of transformation from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar and the reign of Augustus. Its unifying thread is change of form: gods, humans and nymphs become animals, plants, stones, stars and springs, usually at moments of extreme passion, violence or divine punishment.

C. S. Lewis

1945 · Postwar Contemporary · Novel

That Hideous Strength, subtitled A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups, completes the trilogy that began with Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, though it moves the action from other planets to an English university town. Mark Studdock, a young sociologist and fellow of Bracton College in Edgestow, longs to belong to the inner circle of the college's Progressive Element.

Thomas Bulfinch

1855 · 19th Century · Collection

The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes, is Thomas Bulfinch's prose retelling of Greek and Roman mythology, with shorter chapters on Egyptian, Eastern, Norse and Celtic belief, first published in Boston in 1855. Bulfinch, a bank clerk with a Harvard classical education, wrote it so that ordinary readers could understand the mythological allusions in English poetry and speech.

Anonymous

composed c. 1000 BCE – c. 100 CE; KJV 1611 · Ancient · Religious Scripture

The Bible is the sacred scripture of Judaism and Christianity, and the reference edition presents the King James Version of 1611, the most influential translation in English. It is a library rather than a single book.

H. P. Lovecraft

1928 (title story) · Early 20th Century · Short Stories

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories is a selection of Lovecraft's tales, edited with notes by the Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi, tracing his development from early Poe-influenced pieces to the 'cosmic horror' for which he is known. Lovecraft's central idea is that humanity is an insignificant accident in a vast, indifferent universe, and that knowledge of this truth is enough to destroy sanity.

Marie de France

c. 1170s · Medieval · Poetry

The Lais of Marie de France are twelve short narrative poems in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, preserved together in one manuscript (British Library, Harley 978) with a general prologue in which Marie dedicates them to a 'noble king', probably Henry II. She says she has heard Breton lais, songs commemorating adventures, and has put them into verse so they will not be forgotten.

Apollodorus (attributed)

1st–2nd century AD · Ancient · Collection

The Library is the only complete handbook of Greek mythology to survive from antiquity. In plain, compressed prose it tells the traditional stories of the gods and heroes in order, from the beginning of the world to the death of Odysseus, organized chiefly by family lines.