Thesis
Consuming men : Promethean masculinity from 'Frankenstein' to the twenty-first century
- Creator
- Rights statement
- Awarding institution
- University of Strathclyde
- Date of award
- 2025
- Thesis identifier
- T17341
- Person Identifier (Local)
- 201751928
- Qualification Level
- Qualification Name
- Department, School or Faculty
- Abstract
- This thesis proposes that Promethean masculinity, a specific form of hegemonic masculinity characterised by egotistical technoscientific enquiry coupled with the exploitation of women, animals and nature, emerges at certain periods of tension between masculinity and both women’s and animal rights. Further, it proposes that this emergence has been reflected in contemporaneous literary narratives. The thesis examines how and why Promethean masculinity manifests in three specific science fiction texts: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and Brian Aldiss’ Moreau’s Other Island (1980). Written at key periods during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, each of the latter texts represent selfaware responses to the former. The three texts have a distinct literary relationship, and this thesis traces, through this relationship, common threads that have previously been overlooked. By linking them to the Prometheus myth, the thesis offers novel analysis of the anxieties in masculinity that each text depicts. While fictional treatments of masculinity, women’s rights and animal rights have all been analysed in the past, this thesis suggests that Promethean masculinity as a specific form, and its confluence with debates about technoscientific attitudes to women and animals, have previously been neglected. It therefore seeks to address the absence of focused work in this area. Drawing on a theoretical framework of scholarship in ecofeminism, animal studies, masculinity studies and mythology, it suggests that the myth of Prometheus offers a useful lens through which to analyse a specifically technoscientifically-inflected form of hegemonic masculinity. It further demonstrates that literary Prometheus figures reveal salient details about the technoscientific landscapes, and the juxtapositions of masculinity, femininity and animality, of the times in which they were written and published. It also indicates some of the forms that resistance to Prometheanism has taken at these junctures, including vegetarianism, feminist movements and anti-vivisection.
- Advisor / supervisor
- Richardson, Elsa
- Fudge, Erica
- Resource Type
- DOI
- Funder
Relations
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PDF of thesis T17341 | 2025-06-16 | Public | Download |