TransportingFrankenstein: Mary Shelley's Mobile Figures
This essay situates Mary Shelley's Frankenstein at the intersection of neurology, epidemiology, and transportation history, and alongside the emergent discipline of tropical medicine that united them. One artifact of this nexus of disciplines, it argues, was a persistent tropicality, or high figurality: the metaphoric processes in which physicians and engineers sought to establish and confirm Britain's, and Britons', insularity were plagued by eruptions of metonymic instability. Proposing that Shelley's novel was informed by more than tropical medicine's preoccupations with insularity, contagion, and mental hygiene, this essay explores Shelley's uses of metaphor and her enactment of metonymic seriality on the level of narrative form. The essay makes the case for restoring the connections between subjectivity and the emergence of global networks in our current approaches to Romantic affects and mobilities, and for the indispensability, especially in this context, of attending closely to the poetics of non-...