Abstract
Naming the parts of the assembled title, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, signposts the three major influences playing on her life and work: namely that unholy trinity of Shelleyan aesthetics, Wollstonecraftian feminism and Godwinian radicalism, which produced a daughter of the Enlightenment as ideologically hybrid and disparate as the very creature pieced together by Victor Frankenstein. Invoking such an irresistible parallel is not to comply with Aristotle’s equation of the female with the monstrous, but instead to give resonance to this amalgam of conflicting elements destined to propagate both the unexpected and the incongruous.
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© 1992 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Roberts, M. (1992). Mary Shelley: Immortality, Gender and the Rosy Cross. In: Martin, P.W., Jarvis, R. (eds) Reviewing Romanticism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21952-0_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21952-0_5
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