ABSTRACT
Conceived on the margins of high culture, and specifically of the radical Romantics of the first decades of the nineteenth century, Frankenstein is incomprehensible without the Enlightenment “culture of sensibility” and its gendered paradoxes. Nor is it conceivable without the tensions raised by its encounter with the questioning of the strong notions of Truth, Virtue, and Identity that both Enlightenment and Romanticism entailed. This chapter aims to bring together, or question, the explanatory and contextual force of the various interpretations of Mary Shelley's story – scientific, political, gendered, and racial – in light of the crossover between the Enlightenment and Romantic sensibilities. Thus, it also explores the book's transcultural and transtemporal readings, especially in Southern Europe and Latin America.
