ABSTRACT
While Percy Shelley explored 'the status of life as a value and the relation of poetry to that value', as Maureen McLane has demonstrated, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein ardently pursues 'the nature of the principle of life' and the problems of 'its ever being discovered and communicated'. Mary Shelley's classic narrative about mechanical reproduction and circulation is widely recognized as a radical communications experiment, a linguistic laboratory of sorts that puts media into monstrous crisis and inevitably forces the question of what makes people human, while the ensuing multi-media myth often expresses a deep uneasiness about the science of life and the many forms of biopower attendant upon modernity. In both form and content, Frankenstein thus foregrounds not only the extent but also the means by which scientific and artistic invention as well as intervention, artifice broadly conceived, might alter as well as create the conditions of life.
