Introduction

When Evelyn Fox Keller wrote that 'Frankenstein is a story first and foremost about the consequences of male ambitions to co-opt the pro-creative function', she took for granted an interpretive consensus amongst late twentieth-century critical approaches to the novel. Whilst the themes had been revealed as 'considerably more complex than we had earlier thought', Fox Keller concludes 'the major point remains quite simple'. The consensus might be characterised a little more broadly than this - as a view that the novel is about masculinity and scientific hubris - and has led to an enduring use of the title as a byword for the dangerous potential of the scientific over-reacher: It was in this vein that Isaac Asimov coined the term 'the Frankenstein complex' to describe the theme of his robot stories in the 1940s, and The Frankenstein Syndrome is the title for a collection of essays on genetic engineering published in 1995.