Frankenstein Kickass Paper -- essays research papers

     The daughter of an active feminist, Mary Woolstonecraft Shelley eloped with the famous poet Percy Bysshe Shelley at the age of 15, and by and by was continually and profoundly influenced by his words and writings. Her novel Frankenstein is named among the best scripted and most meaningful of the mediaeval works, and is one of the few still popularly read today. A precursor to the Romantic trend in imposture and intellect, black letter novels rejected of the precepts of order, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in general and recent 18th-century classicalism in particular. The gothic tradition grew out of disillusionment with the Enlightenment and 18th-century freethinking and physical materialism. Romanticism 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 mysteriou s fears of our Nature, and would awaken thrilling horror--one to make the reader dread to look around, to curdle the blood and recreate the beatings of the heart." By infusing moral and social concerns into the gothic style, Shelley achieves more than a mere(a) horror story, however. The universal societal and psychoanalytical questions raised in Frankenstein pay back its place in world literature and promise decades of similarly make gothic writings.     As nationd above, the gothic genre developed as a harsh reaction to the predominant Neoclassic ideals of the time the vehemence shifted from the whole to the solitary, and from society to nature. The "Graveyard Poets," one of whom is Thomas Gray, are attributed with having ushered in the new philosophy and are often termed "Pre-Romantics." Grays "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" has all the elements of the gothic graves, overtones of death, a inelegant setting, and a desir e for return to a more simplistic, natural time. Simultaneously, Jean-Jacques Rousseau preached a similar creed which presented society as evil, and called for a "natural state of man." Shelley was schooled in both 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 " magnetic dip of the House of Usher" and Hawthornes "Young Goodman Brown" use many gothic conventions and themes, such as the ominous tone, dream-like or surreal sequences, and warnings about mutualness 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 whence again disappearing into obscure circles of its few disciples. In this scientific age, the gothic is viewed as being overly sentimental, predictable, and implausible. As the ages chang e, readers, like Victor, are compel to "exchange chimeras of boundless 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 good to evil. Without one, the other is undefined and therefore has no bearing in its existence. Frankenstein will live on as a fantabulous insight into both the political environment of the 18th century and the deathless condition of man as an extension of nature.