The sublime landscapes of Frankenstein

Abstract

Mary Shelley uses the sublime natural environment as a vehicle to narrate the anguish, turmoil and triumph of the characters in Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus ([1818] 2010). This practical research investigates Shelley’s use of the sublime through distant reading, data visualization and abstraction to explore unseen narrative patterns in the text. It explores data collection and visualization to analyse the language in the text through distant reading, a method that seeks to map the text as data as opposed to understanding it as a piece of prose. The circle and triangle are used to infer what Burke identifies as the relationship between ‘the beautiful’ and ‘the sublime’ (1757). I am interested in mapping literature through unorthodox methods and to explore abstract narratives through data visualization. I believe that this mathematical and systematic methodology can illuminate the text in unforeseen ways.