Literary critics have uncritically assumed that Count Cenci raped Beatrice. Broader, more creative, and more emancipatory reading is better.

Frankenstein, Prometheus Unbound, and The Cenci are Promethean-themed literary masterpieces written in about three years from late 1816 to late 1819.

Literary name-dropping characterizes early 19th-century author Percy Bysshe Shelley from his earliest works. It peaked in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound.

The preface to the first, 1818 edition of Frankenstein differs significantly in content and authorship from the preface to the third, 1831 edition.

The creature and the De Lacey family in Frankenstein show a second-personal moral claim leading to disaster. It’s not about Monk Lewis’s novel.

Authorship in Frankenstein was plausibly a matter of playfulness between Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

Most British novels of the 18th and early 19th century didn’t explicitly identify a specific, real person as author. Authorship was imaginary.

Shelley plotted a detailed strategy for attributing authorship of The Cenci and manipulating its public distribution and reception.