Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was a direct response to the romantic politics that was ever prevalent in the time periods literature. She explored the meaning of man and what it meant to be man. Many consider it to be the fictional amalgamation of Rousseau's ideal man who must find himself even in the face of adversary. This social aspect had seldom been discussed and even more rare published during this time period where life was so uselessly wasted in mines and unsafe factories. These connections help to shape why the book was written as a counterculture response to all that was happening around her.
Judith Weissman Chapter 5 of Half Savage and Hardy and Free: Women and Rural Radicalism in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Middletown: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 123-138
Judith Weissman Chapter 5 of Half Savage and Hardy and Free: Women and Rural Radicalism in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Middletown: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 123-138