The Environments of Frankenstein

abstract:This prolegomenon to a collection of eleven essays provides a setting for them all by explaining the ongoing significance of Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein two hundred years after it was first published; the theme of multiple “environments” that imbues Frankenstein and its offshoots and that is common to all these essays; the novel’s emergence from a generic environment of fiction (the Gothic) that established itself in the 1760s and continues to this day; the history of interpretations of Frankenstein generated by the various theoretical environments in which it has been analyzed; and how all of the following essays, including the particular environments of Frankenstein they treat, both advance that history and fit into the overall scheme of this special issue.