Click on the following page for class-generated materials on Frankenstein.

Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein has a place in our course for several reasons.  First, it is a novel that is retold in Shelley Jackson’s hypertextual novel (on CD ROM) Patchwork Girl.  We will thus have the benefit of reading the novel in the form of its 1831 edition (which was edited and introduced by Mary Shelley) and in Jackson’s retelling. 

Second, the novel has often been seen as metaphoric for the abuses of some sort of technology: particularly the abuses of industrialization in nineteenth century Europe.  The novel also can be seen to comment on the technology of print itself, which was by no means new in the nineteenth century, but that had sped up considerably by then. 

The novel could also be seen, finally, to comment on print and popular culture’s appropriation of Shelley’s novel (for example in the 1823 dramatic version, in illustration, and so forth), which could be seen as a form of monstrosity itself.  (Certainly film dramatizations bear this out.) The novel is a great example of a literary work that succeeds on multiple levels and has captured the imagination of centuries, particularly in the metaphor of Frankenstein’s monster.