Mary Wollstonecraft (1759- 1797) wrote both A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman within a matter of weeks. Why she wants to write the second book about rights continued from the preceding one? I would try to probe into the correlations between these two works. In her argument for women¡¦s rights (even all human being¡¦s rights), Wollstonecraft contested the gendered construction of reason and virtue in political theory. I situate the pioneering feminist as a canonical thinker alongside Locke and Rousseau. Yet, although I admit that Wollstonecraft¡¦s works have been largely been overlooked by mainstream political theorists, in this paper my analysis will offer little explanation as to why Wollstonecraft has been marginalized within the conversation of political thought. To explain why Wollstonecraft¡¦s works has not been included in the canon I pose the question of how this revolutionary woman was authorized to write about political rights. In addition to her perspectives of politics, she also challenged the idea of contemporary patriarchy to fight for women¡¦s citizenship. Therefore, Complex conversations between past and present are involved in any attempt to read Wollstonecraft¡¦s texts or to find the problems of traditional liberal feminism. My study makes no pretension to offer answers to pressing problems. It does, however, provide insights into how present concerns make us resonant to themes in Wollstonecraft¡¦s writing, such as her dealing with the politics of gender difference, her awareness of sexuality and romance, her passionate wrestling with reason, and the relevance of her version of the Enlightenment humanist project to women¡¦s citizenship today. On a more somber note, her proposition makes clear how much exclusion and subjugation of women has taken place within Western feminist tradition from Wollstonecraft onwards and how attentive we need to be to decolonizing the thinking in our own heads while we dream of liberating wider theory.

This essay attempts to define Mary Wollstonecraft’s Mary: A Fiction and Maria or The Wrongs of Woman as early feminist propaganda from its historical perspective. Initially, feministic values as well as propaganda are connected to the eighteenth century with the help of contemporary scholars.  These theories are then applied on Wollstonecraft’s Mary: A Fiction and Maria or the Wrongs of Woman, in order to establish these as propaganda. The conclusion reached is that Wollstonecraft had a political and feminist aim when writing her novels as there are many similarities between Mary: A Fiction and Maria or The Wrongs of Woman and her political text A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Thus, it is possible to regard Mary: A Fiction and Maria or The Wrongs of Woman as early feminist propaganda.

Th. lett. Genève, 1998 ; L. 442. / Im Buchh.: Basingstoke etc. : Palgrave. Register. Includes bibliographical references (p. 203-213) and index.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 367-379).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 279-292).

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.

No description available.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 44-49).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 44-49). Also available in print.