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Frankenstein Source Essay

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Frankenstein Source Essay
Explanation of Source This source is about one of the literary stories that relate to Frankenstein, which is Prometheus, an Ancient Greek myth. In the first paragraph, there is a brief summary of the story of Prometheus. The wise Titan is considered to have brought knowledge and enlightenment to mankind when he brought fire down to earth. However, to accomplish this task, Prometheus had to go against Zeus and steal fire from the God of Mount Olympus. Due to this misconduct against Zeus, who wanted to keep fire in order to punish Prometheus and the humans, he sentences Prometheus to infinite torture. Afterwards, Prometheus is chained to ground on the highest peak of Mount Caucasus and has his liver eaten out day after day by a vicious eagle. Augmenting his daily suffering, Prometheus has the magical ability for his organs to grow back, therefore, resulting in very repetitious torment for eternity. Moreover, after this brief synopsis, there are explanations as to the multitude of factors which may have influenced Mary Shelley to originally name her novel “The Modern Prometheus” and allude to many aspects of the Greek myth.

Why is the source relevant?
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It is evident that Shelley was truly inspired by the themes and occurrences in the Ancient Greek myth in many aspects throughout her classic novel. In addition, Mary Shelley’s husband, Percy Shelley, was even starting to compose his own story of Prometheus in a poem titled “Prometheus Unbound”. It is known that Percy Shelley began to write this work around the same time that Mary Shelley was in the midst of publishing her book

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