Abstract
Frankenstein offered a divided imagining of modern humanity. As a distinctly modern myth concerned with science and nature, it raised questions of power, responsibility, and freedom, opening up issues of social, sexual, and technological production which, towards the end of the twentieth century, bifurcated towards identity politics or technological supersession. At the same time, the rise of technoscience and posthumanism indicated another direction for the novel, a move away from a dual humanity (that was noble and base, man and monster) and towards new articulations in which nature, patriarchy, body, and gender were subjected to global powers of information, media, and economy. Recent iterations of Shelley’s novel manifest themselves in shiny, superheroic digital forms or nostalgic mashes of popular monstrosity. They also—in Bernard Rose’s contemporary film adaptation of the monster’s narrative—signal a disarming and cruel global biopolitical logic furnished with the technological power to replicate and expend (‘garbage’ human) bodies at will.
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Botting, F. (2018). What Was Man…? Reimagining Monstrosity from Humanism to Trashumanism. In: Davison, C., Mulvey-Roberts, M. (eds) Global Frankenstein. Studies in Global Science Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78142-6_17
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