Not so long ago, relative to the world at large, in picturesque Geneva not so far from Lake Leman, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley took part in a not so commonplace "contest". The contest was to write a ghost story. The outcome was Frankenstein; what is considered today to be a classic, one of the first science fiction tales, and a story immortalized many times over in film. And what at its inception was considered little more …showed first 75 words of 2073 total…

…showed last 75 words of 2073 total…to a given work. Moreover, the significant presence of the science fiction genre in today's literature and a wider range of experimentation within novels has left today's critics in a position to be less shocked and offended by a novel, thereby allowing them to give a more impartial critical assessment of a work than was the case when Frankenstein was first published while going beyond the limits of preliminary formal, expressive, mimetic and rhetorical theories.