Abstract: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is steeped in traditional modes of thinking about the “progress of civilizations” that she imbibed in her readings of David Hume, Voltaire, Constantin Volney, and others. Her characters anxiously track themselves and each other into normative accounts of knowledge and action that appear progressively civilized, but none of the characters, including the monster himself, can actually live up to the ideals they propose. Instead, the novel intermittently proposes modes of relation that are founded on the quest for mutual benefit—a logic that I connect to the author’s hesitant embrace of utilitarian thinking.

Category	Quartile
文学	3
文学, 英国文学	3

Frankenstein and the Progress of Civilizations

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