Christina Tumminello

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

It was on a dreary night in November, That I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I Collected the instruments of life around me How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how Delineate the wretch whom with such infinite Pains and care I had endeavoured to form? FRANKENSTEIN or THE MODERN PROMETHEUS by Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley is considered a masterpiece of gothic horror and science fiction. The novel was first published in London in 1818, and it adeptly illustrates, with a resounding magnitude, the ideas and visions of the Romantic Movement as realized by the poets Percy Shelley and George Gordon Lord Byron. Melding the surreal and the real, the conscious and the subconscious, the nightmare and the dream, Mary Shelley, guided by the literary ambitions of her husband Percy, the philosophical legacy of her father William Godwin and the ghost of her feminist mother Mary Wollstonecraft, gives us Victor Frankenstein, a hero reminiscent of Ahab, in dark pursuit of the hideous progeny which is also his alter-ego, the Monster. In the end, FRANKENSTEIN is a tale of madness and longing, the bonds of parent and child, friends and lovers. It is one of literature's greatest psychological stories in its ability to capture human insight and desire, and the depths to which that desire might lead us. Mary Shelley's greatest novel is, ultimately, an undisputed classic for all ages.

Christina Tumminello

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