Responsible creativity and the "modernity" of Mary Shelley's Prometheus

SEL - Studies in English Literature

Volumn 43, Issue 4, 2003, Pages 845-858

  Hustis, Harriet ^a  

^a The College of New Jersey

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950504200     PISSN: 00393657     EISSN: 15229270     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/sel.2003.0040     Document Type: Article

References (12)

1. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), in Three Gothic Novels, comp. Peter Fairclough (Harmondsworth UK: Penguin, 1968), pp. 257-497, 284. Subsequent references, will appear parenthetically in the text
2. Christopher Small, Ariel like a Harpy: Shelley, Mary and "Frankenstein" (London: Victor Gollancz, 1972), p. 48
3. Harold Bloom remarks: "what makes Frankenstein an important book, though it is only a strong, flawed novel... is that it contains one of the most vivid versions we have of the Romantic mythology of the self, one that resembles Blake's Book of Urizen, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and Byron's Manfred, among other works. Because it lacks the sophistication and imaginative complexity of such works, Frankenstein affords a unique introduction to the archetypal world of the Romantics" (Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" [New York and New Haven: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987], p. 4)
4. Zachary Leader, Revision and Romantic Authorship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 172
5. Ellen Moers, "Female Gothic," in The Endurance of "Frankenstein": Essays on Mary Shelley's Novel, ed. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1979), pp. 77-87, 80
6. Hesiod, The Works and Days, in Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1959), pp. 19-117, 23-5, lines 50-9
7. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, trans. David Greene (Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. Greene and Richmond Lattimore, 2d edn., 4 vols. [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991]), 1:311-52, 320, lines 230-45
8. David Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 3
9. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), p. 100. Subsequent references will appear parenthetically in the text
10. Levine and Knoepflmacher, introduction to The Endurance of "Frankenstein," pp. xi-xvi, xii-xiii
11. Levine, "The Ambiguous Heritage of Frankenstein," in Levine and Knoepflmacher, The Endurance of "Frankenstein," pp. 3-30, 7-8
12. Mary Shelley's tolerance of others' influence on her novel is not only cited as proof of the "accidental" and "un-self-conscious" nature of its literary energies, but also serves as a source of much awkward praise of Frankenstein's coherence and structural integrity. Thus, Levine and Knoepflmacher marvel at the novel's very existence, since, based on its 1831 preface, they perceive Mary Shelley as "[w]orking from a parlor game ghost story contest, out of a mind cluttered with an extraordinary profusion of serious reading, with the political philosophy she derived from her father and from her dead mother's writings, the science she learned from Shelley, [and] the moral ideas she adopted from all three" (Levine and Knoepflmacher, preface to The Endurance of "Frankenstein," p. xiii)