In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing - Hardcover

Baldick, Chris

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198117264 ISBN 13: 9780198117261

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1988

Synopsis

The story of Frankenstein and the monster he created is one of our most important modern myths. This study surveys the history of the myth in literature before the advent of film. First examining the range of meanings generated by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in light of images of political "monstrosity" produced by the French Revolution, Baldick goes on to trace the protean transformations of the myth in the fiction of Hoffmann, Hawthorne, Dickens, Melville, Conrad, and Lawrence, as well as in the historical and political writings of Carlyle and Marx and the science fiction of Stevenson and Wells. In conclusion, he shows that the myth's most powerful associations have centered on human relationships, the family, work, and politics.

About this title

About the Author

Chris Baldick is at University of London at Goldsmiths' College.

Review

`no one else has matched the pre-history of Frankenstein so well with the post-history, or indeed attempted a sustained account of what could be called the book's external relations.' Marilyn Butler, London Review of Books

`enormously learned, closely reasoned, incisively expressed'
D. J. Enright, Times Literary Supplement

'an absorbing book ... this careful study will be welcome to student and critic alike'
Hugo Donnelly, University of Southampton, Review of English Studies

'Briskly and cogently written, this is an important, original book.'
VQR

'Baldick's survey is neither exhaustive nor shockingly original, but it does usefully trace some important obsessions through the nineteenth century. Baldick's readings are usually subtle. He is able to appreciate Lawrence's absurdly reductive hostility toward science, while honouring
Lawrence's fitful acuteness.'
Kirby Farrell, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Kritikon Litterarum 18 (1991) American and English Studies

'interesting and readable book ... This is a book which can be enjoyed by the general reader as well as the specialist - in fact, by anyone with an interest in the Gothic, in Romantic literature, and in ways in which myth influences our perceptions.'
Lynn F. Williams, Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Review Annual 1991

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0198117264
• ISBN 13: 9780198117261
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 220