근대성, 인종주의, 코즈모폴리턴 공동체

Modernity, Racism, and Cosmopolitan Community: Re-Reading of Mary Shelley’s

The critical introspection into Western modernity began to be discussed with a full-scale by postmodernists and post-colonialists only in the late twentieth-century. Mary Shelley seems to be a very modem writer because, in Frankenstein, she attempted critical introspection as early as 1818. In Frankenstein, set in Europe in 1790s, Shelley explores the contradictory aspects of modem enlightenment which, despite its emphasis on universal brotherhood and cosmopolitanism, despises the racial other as a savage and an inferior being who cannot share in the light of reason or in the enlightenment. Shelly's critical attitude toward Western modernity is portrayed by the duality of three European men, English Robert Walton, Genevese Victor Frankenstein, and French Felix De Lacey, who believe in the ideal of universal brotherhood and cosmopolitanism in theory but practise racial prejudice in reality. Through the Victor's creature, a cosmopolitan, Shelley proposes an alternative of building a new cosmopolitan community to realize the ideal of brotherhood and cosmopolitanism by subverting existing familial, national, and religious community.