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Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein has been the direct source for many adaptations on stage, television and film, and an indirect source for innumerable hybrid versions. One of the central premises of Julie Sanders’s Adaptation and Appropriation (2006) is that adaptations go through a movement of proximation that brings them closer to the audience’s cultural and social spheres. This essay looks at how this movement of proximation has impacted the monster’s form and behaviour and concludes that this is the main reason Shelley’s vision of her monster has rarely been accurately reproduced on screen. It is clearly impossible for an essay of this length to adequately cover the vast number of adaptations spawned by Frankenstein. It is clear that James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), where the monster has a bolt through its neck and a stitched forehead, created the stereotype that has been the source for many other Frankenstein film adaptations. However, contemporary film adaptations cater to target audiences and specific genres, while also reflecting the current political climate and technological innovations. The conclusion reached here is that while the form and behaviour of Frankenstein’s monster in film has inevitably been revised over the years, precisely as a result of social and cultural factors, it is the stereotype created by Whale that has prevailed over the figure produced by Shelley. This, in turn, supports and confirms Sanders’s theory of movement of proximation.

These poems deconstruct Mary Shelley's monster from a spiritually Chthonian, critically post-structuralist creative stance. But the process here is not simple disruption of the original discourse; this poetry cycle transforms the monster's traditional body, using what pieces are left from reception/vivisection to reconstruct, through gradual accretion, new authority for each new form, each new appendage.

The purpose of this thesis is to give a basic understanding of Percy Shelley's introduction to Gothicism and to explore the Gothic elements found within his writings.

My thesis depicts the crisis of self-legitimation that has accompanied the onset of modern hermeneutics, with its historicised and organicised version of the Enlightenment's 'universal perspective.' In this it follows the lead of the contemporary hermeneuticist Hans- Georg Gadamer in resuscitating the notion of prejudice, but contrasts it with Hannah Arendt's discussion of the human condition. She implicitly locates the problem in modern hermeneutics, the aporia, in the very philosophy of life that Gadamer embraces as its solution. Gadamer confuses the task of the humanities as a search for truth with what it ought to be, a search for meaning. I begin with his depiction of Kant's attack on the sensus communis; I conclude with an examination of the consequences of this attack on the orientation and interpretative practices of current schools of literary criticism with specific reference to Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn. In the central chapter, I focus upon Coleridge's attack on Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802) in the Bioeraphia Literaria, reading it as a fundamental defence of prejudice based on the very fact that man has been made in imago Dei. The consequent logocentricity of humanity that Coleridge insists upon opposes Wordsworth's emphasis upon a transcendental idea of 'feeling.' This fundamental notion forms the basis of Coleridge's definition of the primary imagination. I argue the distinctiveness of his definition from that of the other Romantics and maintain its necessity to escape the aporia. This point is proved negatively by Shelley's Mont Blanc, which seizes upon the radical consequences of Wordsworth's poetics, presenting both heresy and obscurity in the poem. The word 'crisis' thus reflects the urgency with which I advocate the need to re-adopt Coleridge's emphases in contemporary literary criticism.

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

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The present work explicates the concept of "the messianic" as it figures in the work of Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin in order to establish the foundation of a useful (and, one hopes, potentially innovative) critical approach to the works of Mary Shelley, Joseph Conrad, John Fowles, as well as to novelistic fiction generally. This foundation rests on a common quality of the messianic as it figures in Derrida and Benjamin's respective corpora. In their conception the messianic refers not to some individual of divine, semi-divine, or even mortal origin who is charged with functioning as the world-historical agent by whose deeds history itself comes to an end, and a new holy, paradisiacal order is thereby founded, but to the aspirational tenor to humankind's orientation to futurity. The messianic finds expression in the myriad instantiations of human beings' future-oriented activity. As such, it achieves a sort of spectrality--or, to borrow the term Marx applies to the commodity, a phantom-like objectivity--having a somewhat intuitive apprehensibility, if in fact not form or substance.Novelistic fiction, which exploits its own spectrality in a bid for arranging impossible arrangements, realizing impossible realities, ordering impossible orders, attempts to occupy an impossible-to-occupy space between on one hand, the catastrophic present and the messianic future, and on the other hand, the future to come and the future as it is wished to be. Wracked by the tension created by its allegiance to chance, the contingent, and the aleatory on one side, and to the deterministic, the necessary, and the climactic or teleological on the other side, novelistic fiction achieves its particular character precisely through pursuit of its abortive program, just as humanity achieves its character, to the extent that such a notion is legitimate, precisely through its abortive program, which is nothing more no less than survival, than living on.

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.