This chapter looks at the rise of the intellectual field that makes up modern corporate governance. It enumerates the most important conclusions that fell out of the ways corporate governance came to be understood: (1) “good governance” is a function of the adoption of certain practices or structures, not the achievement of operational outcomes; (2) governance “best practices” can be identified and applied across heterogenous firms; and (3) the imposition of governance practices from outside the firm is superior to the governance arrangements generated by the various markets in which the corporation and its constituencies participate. Canada is gently mocked.

Chapter Five focusses on another popular literary discourse, the Gothic, which emerged in the middle of the century and has sometimes been seen as a negative form of the sublime. Wright argues that it fuses various national and generic sources, troubling cultural boundaries and playing an important role in the development of Romantic literature despite its ‘terroristic’ association. Originating in European romance, the literary Gothic circulated around the continent via translations and free adaptations, making it difficult to identify specific sources. Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and Beckford’s Vathek, for example, rely on a combination of often unattributed British and French texts, whereas Ann Radcliffe’s European reception shows the permeability of cultural boundaries and reveals a community of tastes bridging the Channel. Wright then discusses French and especially German Gothic works, which became increasingly popular during the French Revolution, including The Book of Spectres, which indirectly influenced the age’s best-known Gothic romance, Frankenstein. As the author shows, the Gothic fostered communities of readers that transcended national borders, escaping the nationalist labels reviewers had attributed as a way of dismissing the genre, and making it truly cosmopolitan despite its local differences.

This chapter deals with a rarity in Romantic literature: the sublime body. While landscapes tended to be seen as sublime, as outpourings of ever-growing philosophical minds, bodies were more often than not belittled and considered as insignificant husks. While eighteenth-century literature introduced the priapistic sublime into erotic novels, thus juxtaposing demure sentimentality with the burlesque gigantism of the homme machine’s genitals, Romantic poets opened “workshop[s] of filthy creation” where philosophical minds seem to unleash bodies that combine the sublime with the monstrous. Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, thus, impregnated by the sexualized voices of his Ingolstadt professors, gives birth to a grotesque abortion, whereas a generation before Matthew Gregory Lewis had shown what happens when an abbot’s mind loses control and – in an unparalleled example of Romantic hagio-porn – transforms a Madonna lactans into a Mephistophelean abettor to the devil. Byron even goes a step further when he imagines man’s existence as a voyage on a gargantuan female body, constantly threatened by the jaws of a vagina dentata.

‘The Arctic sublime’ was a Romantic subcategory in its own right because of the period’s fascination with Arctic vastness and awe-inspiring icescapes. This chapter examines some of the famous representations of the Arctic sublime, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Das Eismeer, but also lesser-known texts that illustrate the intense contemporary engagement with northern climes. The sources that were available to the public and helped create an image of the Arctic were not only literary or artistic representations but also travel accounts and stories of shipwrecks. The chapter traces the patriotic celebrations of explorers braving the deadly terrors of the Arctic as well the discourse that developed around the optical mirages and illusions in high latitudes. The latter are particularly pertinent as they fitted into a Burkean sense of sublime psychological disruption and disorientation. The chapter shows how the public could – virtually – occupy the Arctic and experience the thrill of its sublime landscapes in books and at exhibitions, while the actual Arctic remained enigmatic and unconquerable.

Chapter 2 explores the 1814 collaboration between Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley and extends scholarly attention to their travel journals, before discussing Frankenstein. Using the couple’s shared journal as a way of marking their convergence and redefinition of themselves from a singular identity to a shared pluralism, the journal’s entries witness a shared understanding – a sympathetic concord – between the couple. This close examination of the collaborative process indicates a willingness to assimilate and accommodate the other’s sentiments and formal constructs. While the narratives of these entries show the completion of each other’s thoughts and a reliance upon readerly circulation, the entries’ form also gestures to their defined plural identity through a vocal blending. With its sustained focus on the sympathetic communities developed by the couple and increased literary production as a result of this lived communal experience, I suggest that the Shelley collaboration ultimately shapes the narrative form of Frankenstein. The novel’s layered narrative of sympathetic texts makes possible a view of the collaborative compilation of the novel as a means of social reform: a view of society that relies upon the affective bonds of sympathy with a community of people, whether imaginative or genuine.

This chapter draws parallels to the gothic trope that surrounded discussions on embryos in vitro in the 1980s as a frame of analysis that has grown in counter-response to law’s tendency to place entities either within the category of a ‘liberal, individual self,’ or outwith it (rarely in between). To explain, the gothic self is characterised by disorder, chaos, and dependency. It cannot be subsumed under the traditional ‘self’ that the law presupposes of its subjects. Further, within ‘the gothic’ lies the key concept of ‘monstrosity’, at the margins of what we deem to be human: ‘we stake out the boundaries of our humanity by delineating the boundaries of the monstrous’. While the gothic trope does not explicitly centre around ‘the in between,’ it is argued that we should see gothic entities as such, because of their common placement - legally, and sometimes socially - on the boundary between liberal, individualised human, and something akin to a science-fiction-esque ‘monster.’ The controversy that causes rhetorical parallels between new research and monstrous beings and mad scientists to be drawn is a major contributor to policy-makers reluctance to revisit the legal status of embryos in vitro.

Many critics struggle with defining the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as the novel offers a combined monstrosity–deformity concept that blurs the distinctions between moral and physical attributes. The critical focus on categorization, however, marginalizes Shelley’s interest in the ethics of looking, and, in particular, her interest in how looking constructs monstrosity/deformity. The novel reveals the failure of transformative vision in the case of monstrosity and deformity, and invites sympathy for the object of such failure by reiterating instances in which the uncanny is familiarized and vision is changed. The creature’s brief encounter with a blind character offers an opportunity for transformative listening, but this goes awry, and reinforces the central tragedy of the novel.

This chapter surveys the literary achievements of the group of writers who gathered together on the banks of Lake Geneva in the Summer of 1816: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley; Percy Bysshe Shelley; John Polidori; and Lord Byron. Beginning with the famous ghost storytelling competition proposed by Byron, it considers the extent to which Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, while located in the earlier tradition of Radcliffean romance, forged new directions for the Gothic mode through its graphic realisation of corporeal and textual monstrosity. While it forces us to reconsider notions of origin and influence among the group, Polidori’s The Vampyre, the chapter argues, bequeathed to the Gothic its own ‘monstrous progeny’. Engaging with, and thoroughly revising, the earlier poetry of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley and Byron, for their part, set in place some of the distinctive features of second-generation Romanticism, even if the works that they produced during this period force us to interrogate the critical distinction between the ‘Romantic’ and the ‘Gothic’ itself.

This is not a work of fiction, although I wish it were. Some of the cases described here could recall the imagery evoked by Mary Shelly, author of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, who tells a horror story about a young rogue scientist who creates an unsightly monster through clandestine, aberrant experimentation. Although Frankenstein is the name of the monster’s creator, Dr. Victor Frankenstein, readers would be forgiven for debating who the real monster happens to be. In Policing the Womb, the story of Marlise Muñoz comes to mind. Brain-dead, decomposing in a Texas hospital, forced by state legislation to gestate a barely developing fetus while her body decays and the anomalies in the fetus mount. Eventually, it will be reported that the fetus is hydrocephalic, which means severe brain damage in this case and water or fluid developing on its brain. Medical reports will also show that the fetus is not developing its lower extremities. The state knows brain death is irreversible.