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Brett M. Rogers, Benjamin Stevens, Classical receptions in science fiction, Classical Receptions Journal, Volume 4, Issue 1, May 2012, Pages 127–147, https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/cls002
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Extract
Even casual readers of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818, revised 1831) are given to notice an allusion to the literature and mythology of classical antiquity.1 For the novel is subtitled ‘The Modern Prometheus’. On its surface, this may recall ancient versions of the Promethean myth (e.g. Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound ). By invoking Prometheus, the subtitle further implies that the novel will share with Greco-Roman literature and mythology more generally an interest in the question of how ‘technology’ shapes and comprises human culture and, so, our relationships to the natural world.2
At a deeper level, however, and in its historical context, that subtitle may be seen to recall Greco-Roman antiquity through at least one modern intermediary. For the phrase ‘The Prometheus of modern times’ had been used, and indeed made famous, rather more recently by Immanuel Kant, in reference to the American experimentalist Benjamin Franklin (‘On Fire,’ 1755, 1:472). From this perspective, Shelley’s engagement with ancient literature, and Frankenstein’s raising of that ancient question, are therefore complicated by the intermediation of older but yet modern uses of ancient myth. As Kant’s phrase suggests, not any longer in ancient myth alone but now in living memory, too, had a man stolen lightning from the sky.3