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9781851245574

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A beautifully cool and elegant survey of the contemporary science and medicine which young Mary Shelley wove so ingeniously into the dark gothic texture of her 1818 masterpiece. With quiet authority and wit, Sharon Ruston calmly assesses the wilder theories, the furious debates, the utopian hopes and the eye-watering experiments, which secretly shaped Frankenstein. Paradoxically, Ruston's scholarship gives the Creature a whole new life beyond fiction. -- Richard Holmes

A beautifully cool and elegant survey of the contemporary science and medicine which young Mary Shelley wove so ingeniously into the dark gothic texture of her 1818 masterpiece. With quiet authority and wit, Sharon Ruston calmly assesses the wilder theories, the furious debates, the utopian hopes and the eye-watering experiments, which secretly shaped Frankenstein. Paradoxically, Ruston's scholarship gives the Creature a whole new life beyond fiction. -- Richard Holmes But as Sharon Ruston's brief and lively new book, The Science of Life and Death in 'Frankenstein, ' makes vividly clear, the novel is thoroughly informed by, and a serious contribution to, early 19th- century debates about what it means for a clump of matter to be 'alive.' -- American Scientist

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Sharon Ruston is Chair in Romanticism in the English Literature and Creative Writing Department at Lancaster University.

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