This thesis examines selected prose fiction works of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in an effort to establish a clearer understanding of the creative principles informing her writing, based on more evidence than her well-known novel Frankenstein provides. Overturning the hitherto dismissive and/or reductive critiques of her lesser-known works, this thesis challenges negative assessments by reinterpreting the structure of Shelley's fiction. Concentrating particularly on the early Frankenstein(1818), Mathilda (written in 1819), and The Last Man (1826), with a focus on the use of insistent embedded quotations, this thesis begins by exploring Shelley's belief in textuality as a form of "grafting." As scholars have suggested, Shelley's literary borrowings are a result of her materialist-based views of human reality. The persistent use of embedded quotations is one way in which Shelley's fiction represents texts as collations of materials. The core of the argument posits that citational "grafting" has distinctive and striking effects in each of the works examined. In Frankenstein, quotations underscore existential alienation by pointing to the need for texts to fill in the lacunae of human understanding; in Mathilda, the narrator uses citations to create a sense of personal identity; and in The Last Man, citational excerpts are used with the assumption that they are shared pockets of meaning belonging to a community of human readers. This reconceptualization of Shelley's writing contributes to the generic taxonomies that are now being used to retheorize "the novel" in more inclusive and specific ways.

Mary Shelley's gothic novel Frankenstein has traditionally been read by critics as a cautionary tale and social responsibility for their creations. However, like many of its gothic sisters, the novel also contains other substantial lodes which can be mined by the twentieth century literary critic.One largely ignored and potentially rich vein in the novel is the compulsive and self-destructive behavior of Dr. Frankenstein himself. No critic has yet borrowed Freud's black bag of psychoanalytical tools and used them to plumb the subterranean depths of the young scientist's labyrinthian unconscious.After the death of his mother, and despite his protestations to the contrary, Dr. Frankenstein's real desires are unconscious, the primary one being the need for closure of the family circle. These repressed desires are fulfilled by his alter ego, the homicidal monster he stitches together in an obsessive effort to reconcile life and death. The study seeks to reveal Dr. Frankenstein as an allegorical figure representing the dark side of man's nature.

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The Sentimental/Gothic myth, which dominates much of English and American literature during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, represents a cultural attempt to achieve unity, but the attempt is foredoomed because the essence of the myth is division. The myth's metaphor is sexual. The division that forms the acknowledged basis of the myth is that between two modes of being, seen as sexual modes: masculinity (power, aggression, violence, energy, dominance, etc.) and femininity (attraction, passivity, submissiveness, etc.). The unity sought by the myth on its acknowledged level is domestic harmony, the infusion of masculine strength into feminine passivity, the taming of masculine power by feminine submissiveness. Thus the myth regardsmarriage as the perfect state and the family as the perfect model of cultural unity. But the myth itself is flawed by a further division, of which the masculine/feminine division is actually a reflection: this is a division of the conscious, Sentimental myth from the largely unconscious Gothic myth. The Gothic, reversing the acknowledged direction of the myth (or carrying it full-circle to its inevitable conclusion), seeks the destruction of femininity by masculinity, the throwing off of feminine submissiveness by masculine violence. Thus it regards death(the "marriage" of murderer and victim) as the perfect state, and sterility, the blasted family, as the perfect model of unity.Mary Shelley's Frankenstein reflects both mythic divisions and their close interrelationship. Its hero seeks to establish his Sentimental masculinity and to achieve domestic unity, but in doing so creates the Gothic Monster who destroys the creator's beloved, his family, and finally drains life from the hero himself. Frankenstein, in form, themes, and characterization, reflects the ironies by which the Sentimental/Gothic myth is divided against itself, and shows the tragic consequences of its divisions.

The presidial system was the focus for Spanish and Mexican military operations in northern New Spain. The Spanish established these garrisons to provide their settlers and missionaries protection from hostile indigenous tribes opposing expansion into their territories. Between 1692 and 1776, presidios were established on the Sonoran frontier at Fronteras, Terrenate, Horcasitas, Santa Cruz, Altar, Tubac, Bavispe, Bacoachi, and Tucson. The Spanish and Mexican governments never completely solved the problem of adequately supplying the Sonoran presidios with men and materials to achieve dominance over the native populations. These conditions left the presidios and civilian population exposed to attack and harrassment by hostile Indians. Examination of the major events concerning the presidios from 1790 to 1835, including the Apache pacification policies, establishment of "Indian" presidios, the Mexican war for independence, transfer from Spanish to Mexican control, and the study of presidial personnel, reveals how the presidio functioned as a major frontier institution.

Magister Artium - MA / This thesis will examine the representation of the figure of Percy Shelley in the text of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). My hypothesis is that Percy Shelley represents to Mary Shelley a figure who embodies the contrasting and more startling aspects of both the Romantic Movement and the Enlightenment era. This I will demonstrate through a close examination of the text of Frankenstein and through an exploration of the figure of Percy Shelley as he is represented in the novel. The representation of Shelley is most marked in the figures of Victor and the Creature, but is not exclusively confined to them. The thesis will attempt to show that Victor and the Creature can be read as figures for the Enlightenment and the Romantic movements respectively. As several critics have noted, these fictional protagonists also represent the divergent elements of Percy Shelley’s own divided personality, as he was both a dedicated man of science and a radical Romantic poet. He is a figure who exemplifies the contrasting notions of the archetypal Enlightenment man, while simultaneously embodying the Romantic resistance to some aspects of that zeitgeist. Lately, there has been a resurgence of interest in the novel by contemporary authors, biographers and playwrights, who have responded to it in a range of literary forms. I will pay particular attention to Peter Ackroyd’s, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2011), which shows that the questions Frankenstein poses to the reader are still with us today. I suggest that this is one of the main impulses behind this recent resurgence of interest in Mary Shelley’s novel. In particular, my thesis will explore the idea that the question of knowledge itself, and the scientific and moral limits which may apply to it, has a renewed urgency in early 21st century literature. In Frankenstein this is a central theme and is related to the figure of the “modern Prometheus”, which was the subtitle of Frankenstein, and which points to the ambitious figure who wishes to advance his own knowledge at all costs. I will consider this point by exploring the ways in which the tensions embodied by Percy Shelley and raised by the original novel are addressed in these contemporary texts. The renewed interest in these questions suggests that they remain pressing in our time, and continue to haunt us in our current society, not unlike the Creature in the novel.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa / Autor no autoriza el acceso a texto completo de su documento.

The notion, which has persisted over many years, of Mary Shelley as the conservative daughter of a radical, proto-feminist mother can be traced to the views of Edward Trelawney, a contemporary and fair-weather friend of Shelley. This study, by exploring female identity, largely in terms of modern feminist psychoanalytic theory, in several of Shelley's lesser-known novels, attempts to contribute to the efforts of those who have challenged such notions and who have strived to render a more accurate portrait of Mary Shelley. / Anne Mellor's discussion of female identity in Shelley's sentimental novels, Mathilda, Lodore and Falkner, (in her book Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters) does much to dispel the notion of Shelley's apathy with regard to gender politics. Mellor convincingly argues that these novels celebrate what she terms the "relational" identity of their heroines, and thus "support a feminist position which argues that female culture is morally superior to male culture." She further maintains, however, that these novels simultaneously reveal the damage that such an identity can do to a woman's personal development. / My paper challenges Mellor's assertion that Lodore and Falkner Shelley's last novels, portray relational identity with ambivalence. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa