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Ah, so you found the Fantasmagoriana too? Yes, I came across that two days ago in an article I was reading about Polidori (“Dr. Polidori and the Genesis of Frankenstein” by James Rieger). Rieger suggests that there is only one extant copy of this book in the US, and that in the Library of Congress. Rieger says that Fantasmagoriana is “described by the only scholar who claims to have read it as ‘a poor sort of book'” (466).
And this is a exciting connection, too–but, then, if this were the whole story, why Polidori and not Mary Shelley, who is the one who gives the account of Fantasmagoriana? After all, Frankenstein is a much better known book, and also has themes that resonate with the game (as well as an interesting layered narrative structure, as Phantasmagoria has in a different way). My strongest hypothesis so far centers on the relationship between the Byronic Lord Ruthven and Aubrey (who is generally taken to represent Polidori). I suspect that the presence of this book means we’re to read Carno as a Byronic figure, parallel to Ruthven, but this hypothesis needs a lot of refinement still.
These are interesting articles you found; they present a very different perspective than the ones I’d been digging up in literary journals, even though the basic sources and details are the same. Thank you!
Hi!
I’ve done a little work, and I’m working on proposing more. I just started on an M.A. in English Literature. At the moment I’m taking some work I did in my undergrad on the representation of women in King’s Quest and developing some of the theory I improvised for that project into a more universal “literary” approach to games in general, which I will present at a conference in the spring. I’m also looking into doing some work on the Gothic motifs in Phantasmagoria, starting with the inclusion of Polidori’s Vampyre; I’d like to do this for my master’s thesis.Have you read James Paul Gee’s book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy? That was where my adviser on my undergraduate study on King’s Quest had me start. I can recommend a few other works if you want published scholarly works that deal with video games; I keep an annotated bibliography.
As to hardware issues: it shouldn’t be too hard to format a hard drive (especially if you got a slightly older one) and, if you have the installation discs, install an older Windows. I can say this from experience: the Windows XP Compatibility mode in Windows 7 doesn’t work very well at all. I’m looking into requisitioning an old PC from my department that would probably be thrown away if anyone noticed it was sitting in my office, which should run Win 98 if I can get it operating.
I had been stalking the site for a while, but the move to this institution and my other computer crashing distracted me (and lost a lot of my Sierra links). And when I got back here–it was all updated!
I’m interested in seeing what exactly you are doing with the media. It sounds interesting (and probably more relevant than my literary approaches, but I do what I’m good at).
