Frankenstein: Interrogating Gender, Culture and Identity

Mary Shelley’s debut novel Frankenstein was composed and written during a period of immense creative and personal turmoil in the summer of 1816. A summer spent in exile from England after her elopement with Percy Shelley and the resultant cleavage from all that was dear and familiar. Away from family and friends the novel casts a long look backwards at her parent country and conveys an acute sense of displacement. Having moved away from the uneasy status of being a literary curiosity the novel is now considered an indispensable component of the Romantic studies, Victorian novel and feminist polemics. It posits ways in which Mary Shelley manipulates and recasts the central tropes of Jacobinism and Romanticism to create an elaborately detailed plot that breathes psychic violence and despair. This anthology contains a collection of original essays as well as a few essays culled from journals that query a range of subjects related to gender, to politics, to history, to culture and their combined capacity to forge identity. It also focuses on new ways of reading the novel specifically drawn from the experience of being a postcolonial critic teaching English literature in India.