Frankenstein

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In her lifetime, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley was often overshadowed by the many literary influences with whom she associated, from her own parents to her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley and his friend Lord Byron. However, Mary Shelley’s terrifying ghost story, from its inception on a stormy night to its publication in 1817 to its numerous forms on stage and screen, crept into the popular psyche more deeply than anything written by her associates. Shelley’s monster illuminated the terrors of childbirth, irresponsible science, technology and parenting; and her orphaned creature, ugly beyond all imagining, made readers reconsider who the world’s monsters really are and how society contributes to creating them. It is a parable for our time, an enduring prophecy, a remarkably acute diagnosis of the lethal nature of denial: denial of responsibility for one’s actions, denial of the shadow-self locked within consciousness. Mary Shelley’s waking nightmare on June 16, 1816, inspired one of the most powerful horror stories of Western civilization. It can claim the status of a myth, so profoundly resonant in its implications for our comprehension of our place in the world that it has become, at least in its barest outline, a trope of everyday life. VIVA MODERN CRITICAL INTERPRETATIONS presents the best current criticism on the most widely read and studied poems, novels and dramas of the Western world, from Oedipus Rex and the Iliad to such modern and contemporary works as William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Don Delillo’s White Noise. Table Of Contents Introduction The Monster Frankenstein’s Fallen Angel Making a Monster Frankenstein’s Monster and Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain Literate Species: Populations, "Humanities," and Frankenstein Facing the Ugly: The Case of Frankenstein "Passages" in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Toward a Feminist Figure of Humanity? Acts of Becoming: Autobiography, Frankenstein, and the Postmodern Body The Political Geography of Horror in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Frankenstein, Invisibility, and Nameless Dread Chronology Contributors