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Literature Criticism
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From: Giants of the Past: Popular Fictions and the Idea of Evolution[(essay date 2004) In the following essay, Hopkins draws parallels between the notion of the monster in Stoker’s works and concepts relating to the theory of evolution.] Throughout On the Origin of Species, Darwin...
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From:St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers (4th ed.)The outline of the plot of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's first novel, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, is known to almost everyone on the planet. Of no other science fiction novel can such a claim be made. A...
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From: The Monthly Review[According to the author of this excerpt from a brief, unfavorable review. The Last Man is excessively extravagant and morbid, “the offspring of a diseased imagination, and of a most polluted taste.”] Mrs. Shelley,...
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From:Victorian Studies (Vol. 62, Issue 3) Peer-ReviewedThis article revisits the 2006 diplomatic standoff between Indonesia and the World Health Organization over wild-type (or naturally occurring) viral flu samples in the context of the ongoing War on Terror, the COVID-19...
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From:Gothic Studies (Vol. 15, Issue 2) Peer-ReviewedIn The Last Man, Mary Shelley builds on Edmund Burke's aesthetic theory and Ann Radcliffe's definition of Gothic terror as elevating and imaginative by projecting sublime terror onto her landscapes. Yet, her characters'...
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From:TLS. Times Literary Supplement (Issue 6110)For obvious reasons, when it comes to literature born of epidemics, people think of Boccaccio and Daniel Defoe. Mary Shelley, one of the most important keepers of a plague journal of a later age, is usually overlooked....
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From:Mosaic: A journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature (Vol. 35, Issue 2) Peer-ReviewedThis essay reads Mary Shelley's narrative of a plague-ravaged world in terms of contemporaneous medical theories of disease transmission. It argues that disease functions both literally and metaphorically in The Last...
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From:Style (Vol. 51, Issue 2) Peer-ReviewedComposed after the destruction of her beloved circle of family and friends, Mary Shelley's The Last Man conducts readers through a narrative heretofore unrecognized as exceedingly experimental. This essay argues that...
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From: Tait's Edinburgh Magazine[In a mixed review of Shelley's Rambles in Germany and Italy, Johnstone suggests that the book reveals too many personal details and too few factual and philosophical observations.] Any work must have strong claims to...
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From:Reference Guide to English Literature (2nd ed.)Published anonymously before its author was 21, Frankenstein shocked some reviewers but was well received by readers. The book remains popular but is now less familiar than numerous film adaptations, many of which reduce...
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From: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus[The “Preface” to the first edition of Frankenstein, published in 1818 and excerpted below, was presented as the work of Mary Shelley. She revealed, however, in a later preface that her husband actually wrote it. Here,...
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From: an Excerpt from Her Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley[The author of the first full-length biography of Shelley. Moore demonstrates an attitude that persisted until recently: that Shelley's chief significance derived from her relationship with her husband. Moore essentially...
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From: North Dakota Quarterly[(essay date spring 1990) In the following essay, Allman explores the emphasis on creation in the absence of maternity as a recurring theme in works of science fiction, including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.] The first...
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From: Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text[When a third edition of Frankenstein was produced in 1831, Shelley wrote a new introduction, reprinted below with James Rieger's notes. Shelley briefly recounts her biography, with an emphasis on her intellectual...
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From: The London Literary Gazette[In the following excerpt from a review of The Last Man, the critic commends Shelley's ambitious subject, but finds the novel generally unsuccessful due to plot implausibilities and too many “horrors.”] This is a novel...
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From: Studies in the Novel[(essay date summer 2000) In the following essay, Liggins examines Shelley's depiction of female corpses in Frankenstein, arguing that they incite both desire and horror, and provide a commentary on contemporary medical...
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From: Woman's Work in English Fiction: From the Restoration to the Mid-Victorian Period[In a general overview of Shelley's fiction, Whitmore discusses Frankenstein, Valperga, and Lodore as the author's only noteworthy novels.] Frankenstein is one of those novels that defy the critic. Everyone recognises...
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From: The Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany[In the following excerpt, the critic faults the exaggerated, somewhat impious, and decidedly “Godwinian” premises of Frankenstein.] [Frankenstein] is one of the productions of the modern school in its highest style of...
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From: Science Fiction Before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology[(essay date 1994) In the following essay, Alkon offers an overview of science fiction written during the nineteenth century when, he asserts, an "acceleration of intellectual and material change ... resulted in turning...
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From: The Athenaeum[The following excerpt is from a favourable notice of The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck.] [The] volumes before us [The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck] are the productions of no ordinary pen. It is manifest that a...