Frankenstein and its Environments: Then and Now ed. by Jerrold E. Hogle (review)

As Jerrold E. Hogle notes in his prolegomenon to this special issue of Huntington Library Quarterly, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheushas 'continued to seethe in the cultural unconscious' (p. 644) since it first appeared in January 1818. Upon publication Shelley's work 'gave symbolic form to a large number of cultural trends' (p. 644) and, as the scholars and writers in this special issue demonstrate, the novel continues to loom large in our collective consciousness, its tensions, ruptures, and cultural shifts continuing to resonate in the present day.

Arising out of oral presentations given at a bicentennial celebration at the Huntington on 11–12 May, 2018, ' Frankensteinand Its Environments' ranges across conflicted cultural environments and debates and reflects the interdisciplinary nature of modern literary studies. The articles develop previous scholarship by examining 'the environmentsthat infuse Frankenstein' (p. 645), providing critical readings of the personal, literary, physical, cultural, intellectual, and scientific milieus with which the novel intersects. By juxtaposing contemporary influences upon the novel with contemporary responses, the writers within this special issue also aim to challenge the limits of current scholarship, and to demonstrate the symbolic power of Gothic liminality in times of cultural conflict and transition.

Hogle's Introduction provides an extensive overview of recent critical thinking about Frankensteinand is supplemented by an extensive bibliography of important scholarly work on the novel from within the last decade. The remaining eight essays fall into four pairs, with each pair examining 'closely related kinds of environments, all of which are fundamental to Frankensteinor to the adaptation of it or to the issues that this extraordinary tale continues to raise for us now' (p. 658).

Susan Wolfson and Gillian D'Arcy Wood examine the personal, literary, and physical environments from which the novel first emerged in their respective contributions, ' Frankenstein's Origin-Stories' and 'The Volcano that Spawned a Monster: Frankensteinand Climate Change'. Wolfson's wide-ranging and engaging essay, which combines a rigorous New Historicist approach with feminist enrichments, questions the idea of a single origin for the novel, posing the problem 'What is origin? Who is its "Author"?' (p. 664) before re-establishing how the wide array of reference points for the novel reinforce, rather than undermine, Shelley's own authorial authority. D'Arcy Wood, meanwhile, combines a New Historicist approach with ecocriticism and climate change studies to consider the impetus of the disastrous 'Year without a Summer' within the text, as well as the ways in which our present climate emergency unveils 'a true myth, still grander, more totemic, and more urgent' (p. 703).

In the second pair of essays, Alan Bewell and Maisha Wester shift the conversation towards two further interdisciplinary environments. Bewell's 'Moving Parts: Frankenstein, Biotechnology, and Mobility' provides a 'bioethical' reading of the novel, arguing that Victor Frankenstein's creation of a new living being acts as a critique of the selective breeding utilised by farmers of Shelley's era. Bewell utilises postcolonial ideas to argue for the novel as 'a precursor to biotechnology that treated animals as machines and people as slaves to be used as their masters saw fit' (p. 728). In 'Et Tu, Victor? Interrogating the Master's Responsibility to – and Betrayal of – the Slave in Frankenstein', Wester interrogates this conflict further by examining the ways in which Shelley's text engages with the racial anxieties of her era. Wester ably contents that the novel's spectrality – and its central question about who the monster really is – 'provides Shelley's final comment on slavery and the future' (p. 748), demonstrating that 'slavery will haunt Britain beyond its moment, remaining in memory as something hopefully dead but not certainly so' (p. 748).

The third pair of essays contains Robert Mitchell's ' Frankensteinand the Sciences of Self-Regulation' and Alan Richardson's 'Wild Minds: Frankenstein, Animality, and Romantic Brain Science'. Both advance New Historicist discoveries...