Frankenstein and Enlightenment The Danger of Unregulated Thought in Frankenstein Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus, considered by many to be one of the first science-fiction novels written, is rife with anti-Enlightenment undertones. Shelley's novel, first published in 1818 and republished in 1831, examines the roles of science and religion, and provides a commentary on the dangers of playing God. Considering that Mary Shelley was the daughter of two prominent Enlightenment

Monstrosity in Frankenstein Mary Shelly's Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus, which is considered by many to be one of the first science-fiction novels that was ever written, is full of anti-Enlightenment sentiments, many of which are still present in society today. Shelley's novel, published first in 1818 and then edited and republished in 1831, takes a look at the conflicts between science and religion. Through this examination, Shelley provides insight into

Her blooming full-pulsed youth stood there in a moral imprisonment which made itself one with the chill, colorless, narrowed landscape, with the shrunken furniture, the never-read books, and the ghostly stag in a pale fantastic world that seemed to be vanishing from the daylight. (Eliot, XXVIII) However it is worth noting the implicit paradox expressed here in the notion of a married woman's "oppressive liberty." Dorothea Brooke marries sufficiently well

Ross (1988) notes the development of Romanticism in the late eighteenth century and indicates that it was essentially a masculine phenomenon: Romantic poetizing is not just what women cannot do because they are not expected to; it is also what some men do in order to reconfirm their capacity to influence the world in ways socio-historically determined as masculine. The categories of gender, both in their lives and in their

A survey of scientific responses to extinction at the present moment is fairly unambiguous, however. Paleontologist James Kirchner calculated in 2002 that extinction rates could more or less be statistically inferred from the fossil record, and uses this to quantify what he terms "evolutionary speed limits," which is to say the rate at which the Darwinian process of natural selection (which depends upon the effective extinction of species insofar as

According to Mctiernan (1997), "James Fenimore Cooper's the Spy is interesting precisely because no genre had yet hardened around spying when he wrote it. Cooper relies instead on the conventions of other genres -- primarily, the domestic romance and the historical adventure, which, unlike spy fiction, did not evolve in part to justify the dishonesty and covert manipulation central to espionage" (3). As noted above, Cooper was also able to