By jumping ahead a few hundred year

By jumping ahead a few hundred years, we can see this transformation of narrative into a discourse of possible worlds being completed in a work like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), a novel that combines older ideas of human generation with a distinctly modern style of writing. A number of critics have noted that Shelley’s treatment of the Frankenstein monster as the product of her eponymous scientist’s imagination draws on an eighteenth-century understanding of how imagination influences the fetus.30