In 2018, the two hundredth anniversary year of Frankenstein, Romantic scholarship was flooded with new takes on Mary Shelley's extraordinary novel, so it is pleasing to see a collection of essays examining Frankenstein’s debts to the Classics beyond its subtitle, ‘The Modern Prometheus'. Indeed, the volume is described as ‘the first to focus specifically on Frankenstein’s classical receptions' (p. 3). Weiner, Stevens and Rogers's book not only digs deep into the reception of such authors as Ovid, Lucan, Apuleius and Aristotle, but equally attempts to trace the debt owed to Frankenstein as a mediator or lens through which classical influences have appeared in subsequent science fiction. Although the editors state that their intention is to invite readers to investigate the questions raised by this approach rather than cover the subject exhaustively, its difficulty is that, like the Creature, the book becomes something of a patchwork of analyses of sci-fi, Classics and Romanticism. This necessitates an inevitable repetition of key classical reception features and some superficial connections drawn to reinforce an interest weighted more heavily on one of the three. However, generally the collection has a novel and original approach to some previously under-explored aspects of classical reception and popular culture.
The book is divided into two chronological sections: Part 1, ‘Promethean Heat’, is primarily concerned with tracing Frankenstein’s classical debts, with a detailed but incongruous chapter from D.A. Gapp using a scientific analysis to establish the ecological causes of the ‘Year without Summer’ in 1816, which inspired Shelley's ghost story. G. Liveley takes a narratologically ‘patchwork’ approach linking Ovid's Metamorphoses and Frankenstein, and she provides a useful comparative perception on Shelley's reading of Ovid with George Sandys's commentaries on the text, although, as always, it is difficult to track precisely Shelley's reading of Sandys without some speculation. M. Priestman and S.L. Barnett use similar examinations of the Prometheus myth as recounted in Hesiod, Aeschylus and Ovid: Prometheus pyrphoros and plasticator, fire thief and creator of humanity. Again, Priestman offers Erasmus Darwin as a mediating influence for Shelley with a comprehensive overview of his interpretations of the scientific revolution and the Classics in the eighteenth century, just as Barnett suggests John Frank Newton, most famed as a radical vegetarian in the early nineteenth century, as an intermediary between the Prometheus myth and Shelley; yet by this point in the volume we are repeating some ideas that have been referenced and discussed earlier in the collection, and the innovations of Frankenstein itself become a little muddled.
The highlights of this section are A. McClellan's and M. Gumpert's essays. McClellan uses a novel approach to combine Lucan's Bellum Civile, George Cruickshank's caricatures of Napoleon during the French Revolution and Frankenstein, drawing intriguing parallels between the French Republic and the Roman Republic. He focuses on their contemporary socio-political relevancy to characterise ‘revivification’, a preoccupation with the monstrous past rising to influence the present through the same corporeal imagery as Shelley uses for Victor Frankenstein's resurrection of a patchwork of death in giving life to his Creature. The comparison between Erichtho's corpse-soldier in Bellum Civile (6.824–5) and the Creature is particularly compelling (p. 73). Gumpert convincingly relates Victor to Prometheus via the Pandora myth, through an exploration of synthetic creation and the terror arising from the Romantic sublime. He reframes Victor's response to the Creature as a misreading, as ‘the true antithesis of the beautiful is not the ugly but the sublime’ (p. 107), and effectively uses the Pandora episode from Hesiod's Theogony (586–9) as a classical complement. This is thorough classical reception work, interweaving episodes from both texts alongside a contemporary Romantic aesthetic preoccupation with great skill.
Part 2, ‘Hideous Progeny’, blends more contemporary science fiction into the framework of Frankenstein and the Classics. The stated aim of this second grouping of essays is to highlight that the modern-day tropes that are Frankenstein’s own progeny in the public consciousness, such as the ‘mad scientist’ or the ethics of creating a pseudo-human monster, owe a source debt to the ancient world. However, the opening two essays seem thoroughly embedded in a classical reception outlook, and in the following essays the complicating structure of ‘reception-of-reception’ means that the connections forged can begin to feel less consistent in their use of the Classics. The interest here seems to lie more with the relationship between Frankenstein and modern science fiction, and so in some cases the analysis of the classical reception can feel more cursory than the contemporary comparisons.
Stevens attempts to create an encompassing network of Shelley, Apuleius and a science fiction ‘bedroom tableau’ involving the Cupid and Psyche myth; while his analysis is thorough and demonstrates considerable knowledge of his themes, the essay struggles due to the necessary conjecture within classical reception of demonstrating exactly how Shelley read and understood the myth. His general thesis of an ‘Apuleian Science Fiction’ incites interesting questions on genre and reception but requires further detailed examples to become convincing. C.A. Rubino's ethical exploration of Frankenstein is an interesting overview of the history of science and its relationship to Aristotle and Lucretius; his conclusion that ‘there is a Frankenstein in all of us' (p. 150) creates an important ethical question, but its brevity raises more questions than it answers.
As we move into the more explicitly contemporary essays, N. Devenot's enquiry on the relationship between Prometheus and Timothy Leary's experimentations with psychedelics is well researched and fascinating but is less focused on their relationship to the Classics. Weiner and E. Hammond both delve into science-fiction film and have the most success in their use of Frankenstein as a mediating lens through which to view classical reception. Weiner succinctly and effectively establishes the way in which classical constructions of monstrous aesthetics from Cicero and Horace feature prominently in Victor's response to the Creature, and subsequently impact the structural aesthetic choices made by Bill Morrison for his adaptation of Shelley's novel, Spark of Being. Weiner's clear prose and precise thesis do a good job of ‘peeling the onion’ to allow a demonstration of layers of receptions in a variety of media and temporalities. Hammond takes a particularly innovative approach in her tracking of the receptions between the Pandora mythos, the Creature and Alex Garland's 2014 film Ex Machina in relation to the Turing test and the gendered framing of artificial intelligence. This is a creative and thought-provoking example of how classical mythology, literature, film and computer science can be used collaboratively to examine dilemmas regarding very modern technologies. Rogers is less thorough in his examination of Prometheus, Frankenstein and film, with a nod to the graphic novel too, but he does fulfil his introductory aim to raise questions about modernity and mythology, both through the media he chooses to explore and the myth he relates it to, appropriately rounding out the volume with another look at Prometheus.
Although the volume loses some focus as it works to combine classical reception, Frankenstein and contemporary science fiction, the very fact it is attempting to marry three seemingly disparate elements of literary study is encouraging as a starting point for the development of classical reception work. This is the book's primary strength; the classical reception work is interesting and well researched, despite an obvious focus on the Prometheus myth. The section looking at science fiction is less clear in its aim but is an intriguing endeavour for broaching the topic of how an iconic text with classical debts can work as a mediator between classical and contemporary culture.
