Introduction: Biology and the Idea of Culture

Abstract

This chapter analyses Frankenstein's dramatization of the costs and consequences of the drive for transcendence in terms of humanist culture's anxieties about human and nonhuman identities in capitalist production. The chapter considers the novel's considerable critical landscape and then its composition history, using a reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Mont Blanc" to open a key moment in Shelley's novel. The oceanic feeling functions as social feeling that extends outwards to both human and nonhuman others. This oceanic or eco-social feeling is, to borrow a use of the term from Mary Mellor, an "immanent" sensibility, a sense of the interconnectedness of the world. Frankenstein moves like an iceberg in chill waters. Structurally, the narrative is surrounded by the Arctic Ocean and, within each concentric narration, a body of water serves as the background for the novel's most dramatic action.