Frankenstein's Science

Frankenstein's Science contextualizes this widely taught novel in contemporary scientific and literary debates, providing new historical scholarship into areas of science and pseudo-science that generated fierce controversy in Mary Shelley's time: anatomy, electricity, medicine, teratology, Mesmerism, quackery, and proto-evolutionary biology. The collection will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars specializing in Romanticism, cultural history, and the history of science.

Contents: Introduction, Christa Knellwolf and Jane Goodall; Educating Mary: women and scientific literature in the early 19th century, Patricia Fara; The professor and the orang-outang: Mary Shelley as a child reader, Judith Barbour; Geographic boundaries and inner space: Frankenstein, scientific explorations and the quest for the absolute, Christa Knellwolf; Animal experiments and anti-vivisection debates in the 1820s, Anita Guerrini; Monstrous progeny: the teratological tradition in science and literature, Melinda Cooper; Shadows of the invisible world: Mesmer, Swedenborg and the spiritualist sciences, Joan Kirkby; Electrical romanticism, Jane Goodall; Evolution, revolution and Frankenstein's creature, Allan K. Hunter; Science as spectacle: electrical showmanship in the English Enlightenment, Ian Jackson; Collectors of nature's curiosities: science, popular culture and the rise of natural history museums, Christine Cheater; The nightmare of evolution: H.G. Wells, Percival Lowell and the legacies of Frankenstein's science, Robert Markley; Bibliography; Index.