"Frankenstein" or the "Modern Prometheus"

Paper Summary:

This paper looks below the level of the plot exploited by movie version of the book to examine what Shelley herself would have felt was the true level of horror in the book, the investigation of what it means to be human and the terrible things that we might each do ? and in turn have done to us if we were somehow to lose that quality of ourselves that sets us off from all other living creatures as uniquely human.

From the paper:

"It is perhaps true that any movie based on an important book does a great disservice to it, for the media of literature and of film are so essentially different from each other that any translation between the two of them must be cause for substantial cross-cultural fumblings. But Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (published in 1818, long before any author could imagine what the big screen might do to her work) has been especially ill-served by its various cinematic adaptations, which have transformed this novel about a prototypical "mad scientist" who creates a monster who eventually kills him from a serious investigation into the nature of the human soul into a horror flick. Indeed the name Frankenstein has become popularly attached not only the Shelley's creature itself but to a whole genre of low-tech horror movies."

More papers on "Frankenstein" or the "Modern Prometheus":

• Analytical Essay # 28003 : "Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheu"
• Analytical Essay # 53481 : "Victor Frankenstein: The True "Modern Prometheus"
• Book Review # 91904 : "Frankenstein and the Disenfranchised"

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