SOURCE: "The Monstrous Body of Knowledge in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" in Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 34, No. 2, Summer, 1995, pp. 227-53.

In the following essay, Rauch reads Frankenstein as "Shelley's critique of knowledge"—specificially of scientific knowledge as a discourse owned, shaped, and frequently misused by men.

Glavanism . . . independently of other advantages, holds out such hopes of utility in regard to . . . mankind; a work containing a full account of the late improvements which have been made in it . . . cannot fail of being acceptable to the public in general, and in particular to medical men, to whose department, in one point of view, it more essentially belongs.

Preface to Giovanni Aldini's Improvements of Galvanism (1803)¹

Death snatches away many blooming children, the only hopes of their doating parents

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)

I. Knowledge and Culture

New perspectives on Frankenstein are hard to come by. Recent scholarship has provided a wide variety of...