It may come as a shock that the 'boys' club' of Science Fiction was founded by a 19-year-old girl, but the strange life of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley makes it seem quite logical. Shelley's "Frankenstein" (think Gothic manor meets modern laboratory) was an all-too-sane response to the mix of idealism

Catastrophe, Dystopic, Intense, Monumental, Romantic literature, Technology, Tragic

In Sophocles' world, the gods have receded. They've already determined (more or less) the fate of human beings and are content to watch from a comfortable distance. Of course, it's unclear exactly what their motives are; it all seems basically arbitrary and cruel. Indeed, the morality of the gods is

Classical, Classical greek, Excessive, Pathos, Sublime, Tense, Tragic, Violent

Graham Swift seems to have little in common with his literary contemporaries. While most writers these days spatter their novels with pop culture references and play with distortions of time and narrative, Swift sets his books in a nineteenth-century context and tells good old-fashioned stories. He

Contemplative, Death, Dramatic, Paranoid, Tragic

Jane Austen has been reincarnated in the personage of Kazuo Ishiguro. The great novelist of early-nineteenth-century English manners, who observed the moral inconsistencies of the nobility and argued for a form of social meritocracy, could not have hoped for a more loyal and perfect heir to her legac

Composed, Contemplative, Demure, Melancholy, Modernist literature, Tragic