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Julia V. Douthwaite The Frankenstein of 1790 and Other Lost Chapters from Revolutionary France

The relationship between history and literary history is a complex one. Often, the two disciplines are seen as separate, with different aims and distinct approaches and techniques. Simultaneously, however, many would agree that print and visual culture not only reflect but also inflect and shape the events of their times, particularly in our current media-saturated world. But how this works, exactly, is a separate question, one that falls in the interstices of historical and literary studies. Julia Douthwaite’s latest book confronts this problem head-on, examining specific events in the history of the French Revolution, such as the Women’s March on Versailles, or the execution of the King Louis XVI, and illuminating the shifting relationship between the events themselves, their coverage in the press, and their literary representations, both at the time and in the years following. A deft combination of the resources of historical and literary scholarship, the book is an ambitious effort to think about how history is made and the metamorphosis of its cultural and political legacies. Douthwaite focuses on the relatively short period between the fall of the Bastille in 1789 and Robespierre’s execution in 1794, with an eye to the afterlife of these emblematic moments extending through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and even to our own time. Her book, she writes, aspires ‘‘to show how fiction, and, to a lesser extent, its allies in the visual arts (book illustration and caricature) helped to make those moments into an indispensable part of French, English, and in some cases, American culture’’ (2). She describes her work as contributing to ‘‘the historical sociology of concept formation’’ (13), examining how the cultural mediation of various events served to frame them in particular ways and how those fram-