Articles & Fiction
by Molly Dwyer
Here is a list of articles and fiction pieces currently available through this site, either online or by downloading the pdf:
I wrote The Emergent Feminine while pursuing my PhD. It calls for bringing the masculine and feminine into balance, and discusses the cosmological reasoning—the evolutionary imperative—behind that call. It postulates that to survive as a species we must end the prevailing imbalance between these great archetypal forces. The Emergent Feminine was presented at the 1999 International Society for System Sciences Conference and won their Vickers Award. The ideas in the paper are Anna's ideas in Requiem, and make up the basis for her arguments about Frankenstein in Requiem's epilogue.
Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein: Prologue
The Prologue, or Hanging Scene, was a Finalist in the Fiction category at both the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference, 2004 and at the San Francisco Writers Conference, 2007. It is based on an actual double hanging that took place in London when Mary Shelley was ten years old. She did, at the time, live within a block or so of Snow Hill where criminals were brought from Old Bailey for hanging. According to the newspapers of the time, people were crushed to death in the crowds that day. There is also evidence that Lord Byron was there.
That Powerful Attraction: Shelley and the Power Flowing Through the Natural World
I wrote this paper in the summer of 2004 while attending a summer school Literature Program at Exeter College at Oxford University in England. As part of the curriculum, I studied the Romantics, and in a course on Shelley, Byron and Keats, earned an A+ for this paper—which certainly impressed me. Simon Kövesi, Senior Lecturer in Romantic Literature at Oxford Brookes University, was my instructor.
Eve (On Awakening as if From Sleep)
This is a piece of prose/poetry, flash fiction. In 2004 it was short-listed by Mslexia, a publication coming out of Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Mslexia is a prestigious magazine for women writers. Eve was published in Metis: A Feminist Journal of Transformative Wisdom, Spring/ Summer 1997, Vol 11, Number 1. It is probably my favorite piece of writing and is best when heard out loud.
PDF Only
Mary Shelley and the Romantic Imagination
This is a recent paper, written for a talk I gave at CIIS this April. It covers the basics of Romanticism and visits some of the same ideas that came of the union of The Emergent Feminine and Requiem's Epilogue. It is also avail in audio off the News Page.
"If we had never lived, we should know nothing of earth, or sky, or God, or man, or delight, or sorrow. When our Creator bestowed on us this gift, he gave us that which is beyond all words precious; for without it our apparent forms would have been a blind atom in the mass, our souls would never have been." —Mary Shelley