2020 Series. Episode #2 of 4. To escape what came to be known as The Year Without a Summer, a small group holed up in a Swiss villa and challenged each other to pass the time by telling the best ghost stories. Several notable literary works emerged from this friendly storytelling competition. Lord Byron’s poem Darkness, and the seeds of a novel about a blood-sucking man, which was used later by John William Polidori to write The Vampyre. By far the most important work conceived during this blustery retreat was written by the teen-aged Mary Godwin Shelley. That’s right folks, today we’re talking about the world’s first sci-fi thriller, the gothic horror novel, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus. What exactly was it about this work that captured the imagination of Shelley’s contemporaries? We have some ideas. The Scientific Revolution, gender crisis, literary Romanticism, and bodysnatching panics among them.

Find transcripts and show notes at https://digpodcast.org/2020/01/12/frankenstein-enlightenment

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices