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Elizabeth Young. Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor. New York: New York UP, 2008. 308 pp. $75.00 cloth/ $23.00 paper.
In the summer of 1816, when a young Mary Wolistonecraft Godwin joined Percy Shelley at Lord Byron's villa in Switzerland and participated in a short story writing contest, she could not have known the impact her creation would have in the United States in the present. As Elizabeth Young points out in her introduction to Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor, Mary Shelley's creations (both the unnamed monster and Victor Frankenstein) have been used to describe everything from Chicken McNuggets to former Vice President Dick Cheney (1-3). Considering that both Victor Frankenstein and his monster have been so widely used as metaphors, readers may be surprised at Young's claim that although "Frankenstein and its legacy have been the subject of substantial amounts of scholarly and popular writing . . . little serious attention has been paid to the historical specificities of its place in American culture, and virtually none to its racial resonances in the United States" (4-5). Young has three goals in her Promethean effort to create the groundwork to combat this dearth of critical attention, and she addresses these at the beginning of the book.
Her first...