Frankenstein : o el moderno Prometeo

On the night of June 16, 1816, after Lord Byron and Percy B. Shelley had engaged in a lengthy discussion about the possibility of discovering nature's vital principle and transferring it to an inert body, Mary W. Shelley—then a nineteen-year-old—had a memorable nightmare about a monster created by human science. This would become the starting point for one of the most prophetic works in literary history: *Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus*. It is a Romantic drama concerning the human will—determined to emulate and supplant God as the creator of life—which erases the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, thereby raising new moral dilemmas with unforeseeable consequences. Recent advances in the biological sciences—in this era of clones and genetically modified organisms—invite us to walk alongside Mary W. Shelley’s characters along the precipice where human audacity advances, rendering her work a classic as vital and relevant today as it was when first published in the early nineteenth century.