Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - Alan Rauch (essay date 1995)


Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - Alan Rauch (essay date 1995)

Alan Rauch (essay date 1995)

SOURCE: "The Monstrous Body of Knowledge in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" in Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 34, No. 2, Summer, 1995, pp. 227-53.

[In the following essay, Rauch reads Frankenstein as "Shelley's critique of knowledge"—specificially of scientific knowledge as a discourse owned, shaped, and frequently misused by men.]

Glavanism . . . independently of other advantages, holds out such hopes of utility in regard to . . . mankind; a work containing a full account of the late improvements which have been made in it . . . cannot fail of being acceptable to the public in general, and in particular to medical men, to whose department, in one point of view, it more essentially belongs.

Preface to Giovanni Aldini's Improvements of Galvanism (1803)1

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