Frankenstein Kickass Paper -- essays research papers

     The daughter of an sprightly feminist, Mary Woolstonecraft Shelley eloped with the famous poet Percy Bysshe Shelley at the age of 15, and after was continually and deeply influenced by his words and writings. Her novel Frankenstein is named among the best written and most substantive of the chivalric works, and is one of the few still popularly read today. A precursor to the Ro slicetic trend in art and intellect, Gothic novels spurned of the precepts of order, repose, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in particular. The gothic tradition grew out of disillusionment with the Enlightenment and 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism. love affair as a whole emphasized the individual, the irrational, the imaginative, the spontaneous, the emotional, and the transcendental. Shelley herself defines "gothic" as a story "which would speak to the mysterious fears of our Na ture, and would awaken thrilling horror--one to make the lector dread to look around, to curdle the blood and quicken the beatings of the heart." By infusing moralistic and social concerns into the gothic style, Shelley achieves more than a simple horror story, however. The widely distributed societal and psychoanalytical questions raised in Frankenstein secure its place in world literature and promise decades of similarly fashioned gothic writings.     As stated above, the gothic genre developed as a vinegarish reaction to the predominant Neoclassic ideals of the time the emphasis shifted from the whole to the solitary, and from familiarity to nature. The "Graveyard Poets," one of whom is Thomas Gray, are attributed with having ushered in the new school of thought and are often termed "Pre-Romantics." Grays "Elegy Written in a expanse Churchyard" has all the elements of the gothic graves, overtones of death, a rural setting, an d a want for return to a more simplistic, natural time. Simultaneously, Jean-Jacques Rousseau preached a similar credit which presented society as evil, and called for a "natural state of man." Shelley was schooled in some(prenominal) writers, and took their words to heart. In 1776 and 1789 Revolutions swept America and France, indicating that the Neoclassic ideals were not as stable as was previously thought. News of these ... ... and "Fall of the House of scout" and Hawthornes "Young Goodman Brown" use many gothic conventions and themes, such as the ominous tone, dream-like or surreal sequences, and warnings about interdependency and the manipulation of ones mind. The gothic novel revolves as part of the literary cycle, periodically returning for a brief period in the publics eye and then again disappear into obscure circles of its few disciples. In this scientific age, the gothic is viewed as universe overly sentimental, predictable, and implausible. As the ages change, readers, like Victor, are forced to "exchange chimeras of eternal grandeur" which the gothic inspires for "realities of little worth" (Shelley 46). The gothic, the fantastic, is a necessary balance for logic and reason as much as light is to dark, and erect to evil. Without one, the other is undefined and therefore has no purpose in its existence. Frankenstein exit live on as a brilliant insight into both the political environment of the 18th century and the eternal condition of man as an extension of nature.