Critical reference

Critical reference

1. Zachary Leader

   • "The collaboration between Shelley and Percy reflects the ways in which 'Frankenstein' undermines the Romantic image of the lone genius"
   • "the creature becomes more frightening when he speaks in dignified polysyllables"

2. Mary Shelley

   • "an immediate objection to the seeing of my name in print"

3. David Marshall

   • "a parable about the failure of sympathy"

4. Michael Scrivener

   • "a response to the trauma of the 1790s, as perceived by Mary Shelley's immediate radical family circle"

5. Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms

   • Gothic novel
     • "gave way to a vogue for historical novels, but it contributed to the new emotional climate of Romanticism"
     • "sinister, grotesque, or claustrophobic atmosphere"
   • Romanticism
     • "extremes of rapture, nostalgia (for childhood or the past), horror, melancholy, or sentimentality"
     • "freedom of individual self-expression"
     • "appeal of the exotic, the bizarre, or the macabre"

6. Maggie Kilgour

   • "Shakespeare often appears as a kind of patron saint of imaginative freedom for the Gothic"

7. Joseph Kestner

   • "those who try to get close with him are violating him, giving him no room to breathe, and so he flees, on to the next person who is idealised as perfect until he or she begins to care"
   • "Oedipus was himself a miss en abyme in his mother's womb"
   • "3 is of symbolic significance"
     • "male genitals"
   • "No female self-image, furthermore, appeases the narcissistic longing for the homosexual self other"

8. Ricardou

   • the narrative is "imposing itself in a narcissistic manner"

9. Genevieve Crow

   • "The monster, as ugly and hating identity, must commit ugly and hating deeds"

10. Antonio Ballesteros Gonzalez

    • "Mary's favourite play was 'Othello', where monstrosity constitutes one of the most successful rhetorical fields"
    • "Both Richard's and the monster's justifications for their bloody behaviour coincide in their deterministic despair brought about by their deformity and monstrosity"
    • "the fate of monsters is ultimately the fate of otherness"

11. Fred V. Randel

    • "St Petersburgh is the address from which Walton sends off his first letter on the first page of the novel, ad n St Petersburgh was understood to be Napoleon's initial destination in his fateful Russian campaign of 1812"
    • "The creature's trajectory from birth in Ingolstadt to death by fire, amidst Northern ice, is a figure for the history of the French revolution"
    • "By killing the boy, he shows the extremity of social wrong that surrounds him, and he illustrates the need in the novel's implied system of value for profound social and political change, in the direction of greater inclusiveness"
    • "combination of male silence and admirable, though futile, female intervention"

12. Robert Frost

    • "sense of sexual violation of a prone female body"
    • "complex dense interweaving of first-person narratives"
    • "derived from Rousseau and the Bible: two noble savages living close to nature in harmony, separated from the evils and persecution of society"

13. Chris Baldick

    • "We have no all-seeing storyteller giving us a commentary on the meaning of the story's events or passing judgement on each of the characters"
    • "the monster stands for the destructive consequences of uncontrolled scientific inventions and technological development"
    • "the universal belief that electricity was a fluid the t flowed through wires like water"

14. Andrew Green

    • "Mary Shelley does not allow her Prometheus to be released from his torture"
    • "a circular form, emphasising the destructive futility"