Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child

Eileen Hunt Botting is Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame and author of Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Women's Human Rights and Family Feuds: Wollstonecraft, Burke, and Rousseau on the Transformation of the Family.

• Preface. Welcome to the Creature Double FeatureIntroduction. Frankenstein and the Question of Children's RightsChapter 1. The Specter of the Stateless Orphan from Hobbes to ShelleyChapter 2. Wollstonecraft's Philosophy of Children's RightsChapter 3. Shelley's Thought Experiments on the Rights of the ChildChapter 4. Three Applications of Shelley's Thought Experiments: The Rights of Disabled, Stateless, and Posthuman ChildrenNotesIndexAcknowledgments

"Botting's intervention in Frankenstudies is an important one." (Times Literary Supplement) "Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child, in its passion and commitments, vividly illustrates Frankenstein's continuing power, two hundred years on, to comment on the pressing political issues of the day." (Modern Philology) ""One sets a very high bar in claiming that a book on Frankenstein advances a new, important reading-especially one appearing in 2018, when worldwide commemorations of the bicentenary of the first edition are focusing unprecedented attention on Shelley's novel. But such a feat is ventured and gained by Eileen Hunt Botting's Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child"" (The Modern Language Review) "Treating the creature as an abandoned and abused child, Eileen Hunt Botting brilliantly uses the novel Frankenstein to mount a series of thought experiments that interrogate the enduring political questions of whether children have rights and, if so, which ones. Deftly summarizing the positions of such writers as Hobbes, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, and Onora O'Neill, Botting persuasively argues for a child's universal rights to care, identity, and love-rights that Botting here extends to disabled, stateless, and genetically modified children." (Anne K. Mellor, University of California, Los Angeles) "While there has been a great deal written within literary theory and criticism on the novel Frankenstein, and there is a substantial, and growing, literature within moral and political philosophy on the rights of children and the obligations of parents, Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child is the first book to bring these two areas of inquiry together. Eileen Hunt Botting's fascinating analysis shows how literary texts, suitably reinterpreted, can make better sense of key philosophical claims." (David Archard, Queen's University Belfast) "Readers of Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child will never again be able to read Frankenstein simply as a work of Gothic fiction that questioned the counter-theology and scientific bravado of its day. Eileen Hunt Botting, more thoroughly than any previous commentator, has revealed the philosophical content of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and has firmly placed it in the context of modern political thought." (Gordon Schochet, Rutgers University)