A Troubled Legacy: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the Inheritance of Human Rights

ABSTRACT This reading of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus attributes the novel's remarkable versatility to its emphasis on the succession of events and its open reference to eighteenthcentury philosophical .ctions. Undertaking an examination of various Enlightenment predications of human liberty, I argue that the novel's political import resides less in the problem of man becoming god than it does within the paradoxes of man becoming “man.”