In the essay that follows, Knoepflmacher contends that "Frankenstein is a novel of omnipresent fathers and absent mothers," a situation he relates explicitly to Shelley's own family history and the repressed anger at her father that appears to surface in the novel.

In the essay that follows, Veeder emphasizes the significance of Shelley's relationship with her father, examining less its latent aggressiveness than its latent desire. In order to make his argument, Veeder invokes Freudian psychoanalysis, describing Shelley and Godwin's relationship through the structure of a negative oedipal complex.

In the following essay, Lew explores Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a critique of Romantic ideology as well as of the expansion of the British empire. He focuses on her use of Orientalist motifs and images of the dream maiden and the mother.

In the following essay, Rauch reads Frankenstein as "Shelley's critique of knowledge"—specificially of scientific knowledge as a discourse owned, shaped, and frequently misused by men.

In the following excerpt, Gilbert and Gubar view Frankenstein not so much in terms of Shelley's relationship to her own father as in her relationship to literary patriarchy in general, figured in John Milton's Paradise Lost. Noting that Shelley read Milton's poem before writing her novel, the critics assert that Shelley adopted the misogyny of Paradise Lost into her own "pained ambivalence toward mothers."

In the densely historical analysis in the essay that follows, Bewell considers the importance of late eighteenth-century obstetrics in relation to Shelley's composition. Returning to an earlier critical theory that the novel reflected Shelley's own experiences with childbirth, Bewell argues that it "represents Mary Shelley's deliberate attempt to introduce an ambiguously female-based theory of creation into the Romantic discourse on the imagination."

In the following chapter from her Bearing the Word, Homans uses the tools of feminist psychoanalytic theory to study Frankenstein as a parallel between writing and mothering. In this view, Shelley becomes a champion of maternal nurturing, and the novel an indictment of the male desire to reject or excise the maternal role altogether.

In the excerpt that follows, Hobbs contends that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a character afflicted with a "female malady" brought on by his repression of stereotypically feminine traits.

In the essay that follows, Ellis reads Frankenstein alongside the paradigms of the bourgeois family—its idealized structure, its separation of public and private, and its division of social roles according to gender difference.

In the following chapter from her book-length study of Shelley's work, Mellor examines how Shelley depicts human nature in Frankenstein. Considering the novel in its intellectual context, Mellor determines that it "presents diametrically opposed answers": the Rousseauean tabula rasa on one hand and an Augustinian inherent evil on the other.

In the following essay, Adams examines Mary Shelley's participation in the Romantic vegetarian movement and the irony that her fictional monster, assembled from parts obtained from the graveyard and the slaughterhouse, was himself a vegetarian.

In the landmark essay below, Johnson presents Frankenstein not just as a complex fictionalization of Shelley's autobiography, but more explicitly as a commentary on the nature of female autobiography. "Frankenstein," Johnson contends, "can be read as the story of the experience of writing Frankenstein."

In the following essay, Hodges focuses on the literary originality of Frankenstein, arguing that, in opposition to the conventions set by a powerful lineage of male authors, Shelley uses the novel form "to change structures of narrative as well as to introduce new topics of discussion."

When a third edition of Frankenstein was produced in 1831, Shelley wrote a new introduction, reprinted below with James Rieger's notes. Shelley briefly recounts her biography, with an emphasis on her intellectual development and the events that led to the "waking dream" in which she first envisioned Victor Frankenstein and his creature.