Frankenstein (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free

difference between Beethoven’s earliest and later works; a celebration of spontaneous expressive intensity, seen in Turner’s oil paintings and heard in Bellini’s operas; and a keen interest in the exotic and erotic, as in Delacroix’s scenes inspired by his North African travels.
    In Britain, the literary response to the movement was particularly intense. Starting in the second half of the eighteenth century, English writers were strongly affected by the spirit of change in France and America and envisioned nothing less than “the regeneration of the human race,” according to poet laureate Robert Southey. “That was the period of theory and enthusiasm,” wrote Mary Shelley in her unfinished biography of her father. “Man had been reigned over long by fear and law, he was now to be governed by truth and justice” (Sunstein, pp. 15-16). “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” announced William Wordsworth, who along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge would redefine the art of poetry in Lyrical Ballads (1798). Artists are often unaware of “movements” as they are happening or are hesitant to recognize their placement in a particular “era” or “period”; what distinguished British Romantic writers is their self-conscious recognition of a powerful creative force energizing themselves and fellow artists. “Great spirits now on earth are sojourning,” Keats wrote to a friend in 1816. “These, these will give the world another heart / And other pulses: hear ye not the hum / Of mighty workings?”
    As the child of two exemplars of the Romantic spirit of reform and revolution, wife of one of the five most recognized names in Romantic poetry, friend of Byron, Hunt, Lamb, and several other representative Romantic writers, Mary was British Romanticism’s heir apparent. The most progressive currents of Romantic thought and art ran through her veins and electrified her everyday life. Her father, William Godwin, was a former minister turned atheist and radical philosopher; he preached his faith in human beings as rational creatures who did not need institutions or laws to exist peaceably, and expounded these anarchist views in such works as An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). Godwin believed that man is not born evil but becomes vicious through circumstances that are usually set up by those wielding political power. The time was imminent to challenge traditional social order and “things as they are” (the original title of his novel Caleb Williams [1794]) and to set up a society of independent-thinking individuals. The effect of his writings was enormous on Mary, who eventually dedicated Frankenstein to “William Godwin, Author of Political Justice, Caleb Williams, Etc.” Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died a few days after Mary’s birth in 1797, but her spirit was very much alive in radical political circles as well as the Godwin household. (Crushed by his wife’s untimely death, Godwin published Memoirs of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1798 and idealized her the next year in St. Leon.) In addition to writing Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1793) and several other texts promoting educational reform for women, Wollstonecraft published two great human rights manifestos: A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1791) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Considered the first great work of feminism, the latter document asserted that women constitute an oppressed class cutting across the standard social hierarchy; the discussion of the indignities and injustices suffered by women is rendered with real passion and articulateness. The monster’s pleas for justice in Frankenstein derive much of their eloquence and even some of their language from Wollstonecraft’s well-known work.
    Growing up in the Godwin household, Mary was granted immediate access to her parents’ radical intellectual circles. Coleridge and Wordsworth discussed their theories of poetry; the scientist