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Who Is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein?

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Mary Shelley (1795-1851), the daughter of the two great literary figures i.e. William Godwin (philosopher and political writer) and Mary Wollstonecraft (a feminist writer) herself is also a renowned literary personality who is known as an author, essayist, travel writer, biographer, dramatist, and short story writer. But she is best known for her most successful gothic novelFrankenstein”, or the “Modern Prometheus”. Shelley started writing this novel in 1818, when she and her husband i.e. Percy Bysshe Shelley were in the company of Lord Byron, Jane Clairmont, and John Polidori in Geneva (the period of their elopement from London). It was Lord Byron’s suggestion for everyone to create a horror story in order to entertain themselves. This was …show more content…

Victor Frankenstein, who turns out to look like a monster. Such a creation by a man causes death and destruction all around, uncontrolled even by its creator. The novel creates a gothic scenario, full of horror, where everything is sad and gloomy and everybody is dying one after the other.
FRANKENSTEIN AND NEW HISTORICISM- Stephen Greenblatt’s literary criticism, together with Michel Foucault’s philosophy forms the basis of New Historicism. According to them, not only a piece of literature is influenced by the author’s era, but also by the criticism of the text is influenced by the time and circumstances of the critic. Hence in simple words, New Historicism is a literary theory which says that a text should be interpreted both within the context of the author’s historic time, as well as within the critic’s historic context, the environment, and the societal …show more content…

Frankenstein is often seen as a science fiction, or as a precursor of this genre. Science fiction came into being between seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, it furthermore flourished in the twentieth century. Though, the basing of fictional worlds did not occur explicitly before the later nineteenth century. As by that time science was evolving with new discoveries of astronomy, mathematics and physics. Hence the readers got all the more interested in this genre as they related science with the society, technology and the

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