The modulated strain: Prefaces and frames in Blake, Coleridge, and Mary Shelley

To construct a preface to a thesis which explores prefaces and frames may be an impossible, yet necessary, task. Though this preface makes no claims to "modulate" the ensuing chapters, it demands of its readers to explore the hermeneutic hurdles of the texts, to unveil the marginalia, to question the ostensible "extraneities," and to visualize the texts as dialectical exercises between some sort of narrator/teller and the printed page. This is a preface warning about the warnings in William Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.