Frankenstein

On the inaugural episode of Better Read than Dead, we talk about why three jerky socialist academics wanted to do a books podcast. We also talk about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and answer every leftist’s burning questions about it. What does this novel have to do with political revolution? Why is the 1831 edition so much more anti-science than the 1818 edition? And is this novel (as Katie puts it) “19th-century Human Centipede (only less creative)”?

For a terrific discussion of the political currents of the novel, check out Maureen McLane’s Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species. On the show, we read Marilyn Butler’s Oxford edition of the 1818 text.