![\"Mary](\"https:\/\/more.bham.ac.uk\/artsofplace\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2020\/11\/Shelley.jpg\")
Recommended by Jimmy Packham<\/a><\/p>\nMary Shelley\u2019s ubiquitous novel might seem like an obvious choice: \u201cnot this one<\/em> again!\u201d But I want to use this novel to gesture towards what I think is one of the most exciting \u2013 and what I believe is currently one of the most urgent \u2013 strands of landscape and environmental thinking: the ecogothic. Frankenstein<\/em> straddles the Romantic and gothic traditions, and nowhere more so than in its portrait of the various (the myriad!) landscapes through which Victor and his creation travel. As a representative ecogothic text, the novel departs from the vision of nature generally associated with conventional Romanticism, and asks us to see nature as strange and estranging, unfamiliar and disquieting. More than this, however, this is a book that wants us to think ethically about our engagement with the natural world: the creature (himself a horrifying amalgam of nature and culture) works hard to establish a compassionate ethics, rooted in his experiences of nature and animal life. Frankenstein<\/em> also reminds us how natural<\/em> the apparently unnatural<\/em> monsters that haunt our horror stories truly are: from The Odyssey<\/em> and Beowulf<\/em>, through Frankenstein<\/em>, to more recent fare like Jeff Vandermeer\u2019s Annihilation<\/em> (2014) and the Godzilla <\/em>franchise (1954-present). Indeed, in Godzilla I think we have a contemporary creature that rivals Frankenstein\u2019s monster as the most compelling modern myth to illuminate humanity\u2019s ambivalent relationship with the natural world: Godzilla returns to us at moments of ecological and global crisis, to restore a kind of harmony to the natural world, but does so while wreaking terrible destruction on human civilisation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mary Shelley<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":129,"featured_media":832,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[21,37,36,33,17],"class_list":{"0":"post-564","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"hentry","7":"category-bookshelf","8":"tag-19th-century","9":"tag-animals","10":"tag-gothic","11":"tag-landscapes","12":"tag-romanticism","14":"with-featured-image"},"featured_image_urls_v2":{"full":["https:\/\/more.bham.ac.uk\/artsofplace\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2020\/11\/frankenstein-Shelley-square.jpg",329,329,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/more.bham.ac.uk\/artsofplace\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2020\/11\/frankenstein-Shelley-square-300x300.jpg",300,300,true],"medium":["https:\/\/more.bham.ac.uk\/artsofplace\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2020\/11\/frankenstein-Shelley-square.jpg",329,329,false],"medium_large":["https:\/\/more.bham.ac.uk\/artsofplace\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2020\/11\/frankenstein-Shelley-square.jpg",329,329,false],"large":["https:\/\/more.bham.ac.uk\/artsofplace\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2020\/11\/frankenstein-Shelley-square.jpg",329,329,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/more.bham.ac.uk\/artsofplace\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2020\/11\/frankenstein-Shelley-square.jpg",329,329,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/more.bham.ac.uk\/artsofplace\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2020\/11\/frankenstein-Shelley-square.jpg",329,329,false],"ab-block-post-grid-landscape":["https:\/\/more.bham.ac.uk\/artsofplace\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2020\/11\/frankenstein-Shelley-square.jpg",329,329,false],"ab-block-post-grid-square":["https:\/\/more.bham.ac.uk\/artsofplace\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2020\/11\/frankenstein-Shelley-square.jpg",329,329,false],"atomic-blocks-featured-image":["https:\/\/more.bham.ac.uk\/artsofplace\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2020\/11\/frankenstein-Shelley-square.jpg",329,329,false],"atomic-blocks-featured-image-wide":["https:\/\/more.bham.ac.uk\/artsofplace\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2020\/11\/frankenstein-Shelley-square.jpg",329,329,false],"atomic-blocks-logo":["https:\/\/more.bham.ac.uk\/artsofplace\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/42\/2020\/11\/frankenstein-Shelley-square-300x300.jpg",300,300,true]},"post_excerpt_stackable_v2":"