Victor Hugo's "Hunchback of Notre Dame" is one of the most celebrated grotesques in literature. Dr. Frankenstein's monster can also be considered a grotesque, as well as the title character, Erik in "The Phantom of the Opera" and the Beast in Beauty and the Beast. Other instances of the romantic grotesque are also to be found in Edgar Allan Poe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, in "Sturm und Drang" literature or in Sterne's "Tristram Shandy". The romantic grotesque is far more terrible and sombre than the medieval grotesque, which celebrated laughter and fertility. It is at this point that a grotesque creature such as Frankenstein's monster (in Mary Shelley's novel published in 1818) begins to be presented more sympathetically as the outsider who is the victim of society. But the novel also makes the issue of sympathy problematic in an unkind society. This means that society becomes the generator of the grotesque, by a process of alienation. In fact, the grotesque monster in "Frankenstein" tends to be described as 'the creature.'