Abstract

This talk gives a new ‘industrial’ reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. |Critics including Franco Moretti and Chris Baldick have identified Frankenstein’s creature as a symbol of the newly oppressed industrial working class, but I will argue that the novel’s engagement with the new mode of mass commodity production is more complex and intriguing than this. I will show that the novel pivots on the aesthetics and politics of replication: in other words, the central act of the story is a quasi-industrial process of design and copying. I will argue that the novel absorbs and interrogates a profound shift in the ontology and epistemology of the work of art: the increasingly sophisticated power of machines to produce perfect copies of everything from money to cultural artefacts created a Romantic anxiety about authenticity and originality that led to a hyperbolic faith in the imagination as a uniquely inspirational and organic force.

Bio

Ian Haywood is Emeritus Professor of English at Roehampton University, London. He has written extensively on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literary and visual culture. His books include The Revolution in Popular Literature (2004), Bloody Romanticism (2006), Romanticism and Caricature (2013), Spain in British Romanticism (2018, co-edited with Diego Daglia), Romanticism and Illustration (2019, co-edited with Mary L. Shannon and Susan Matthews), The Rise of Victorian Caricature (2020) and Queen Caroline and the Power of Caricature in Georgian England (2023). His next book is Frankenstein and Romantic Visual Culture (Bloomsbury 2027). He was President of the British Association for Romantic Studies 2015-19, and co-ordinates the Romantic Illustration Network (https://romanticillustrationnetwork.com).