Just a comment (other than to say "yes" to all of the above): There are all kinds of people in my department who teach Frankenstein for various reasons, from a composition course to the senior honors seminar on textual variants (taught by a Shakespearean). Since I often run an entire semester on Frankenstein, this becomes a real issue in terms of my course "making" to the satisfaction of our administrators. I'm thinking that I'll have to let go of Frankenstein at some point. But, this semester, we'll get into it from Patchwork Girl with the hope that students will see the novel in a new light.

I think we'll need to reconceptualize important books/authors for courses that aren't simply "single books or single authors" courses. For example, yes the course you teach on Frankenstein is a single book course, but it is also so much more. The way you conceptualize the novel as a form of hypertext make it seem so much more like a cultural cipher than a single book. You aren't simply studying M. Shelley - you're showing how Frankenstein participates in a larger cultural discourse. I treat Blake in much the same manner. We read Blake, but not as a single person. Instead, we read Blake more like what Benjamin would have called a "constellation" - showing how he becomes a transforming symbol for other artists to create their own visions in the late 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries.

This isn't an answer to your question, but may look at a similar problem in a different light?

And by "we," I'm saying our entire discipline.

Thanks, Katherine and Roger. One of the attractions of "Frankenstein" is precisely the ease with which it lends itself to treatment as a hypertext or constellation, to use Roger's helpful terms. That said, I worry a bit about a downside to that treatment: how it has the potential to reinforce the discipline's tendency to portray Romantic culture as a kind of family affair. I'm old enough to remember that not so long ago the only women who were taught in Romantic courses were women who happened to be some one's sister (Dorothy Wordsworth) or some one's wife (Mary Shelley). (Since that time, of course, the role of kin networks in literary production in the era has been interestingly theorized by people like Julie Carlson --in "England's First Family of Writers"-- and Michelle Levy --"Family Authorship and Romantic Print Culture": "family authorship" is, it occurs to me, a domesticated version of Roger's "constellation" or "hypertext.") "Frankenstein" teaches like a dream, but I still worry a bit about what I'm not teaching and what I'm excluding as a result of giving it a starring role--which is all those fictions by people who aren't tied to the poets by familial alliances.

@Deidre Lynch

Deidre, I worry about this too. So, I begin the semester with some Charlotte Smith and try to incorporate Hemans and LEL and, of course for me, the literary annuals (or a sampling from my personal collection) as well as some periodicals (held in our Special Collections). The Gothic is always on my mind (though it's still considered frivolous by many of my local colleagues). One day, I'd like to teach a Romantics undergrad course where I let students loose on the period to discover poetry and prose for themselves that's not in the anthologies. Perhaps next time?

In my undergraduate Romantic poetry survey for the fall ("British Romantic Poetry"), we're reading one novel--Frankenstein. I've toyed with the idea of adding another novel or switching away from _Frankenstein_, but I stick with it for the reasons Deidre enumerates: it teaches so wonderfully, it works like a funhouse mirror reflecting back all the poetry we've read, and it incorporates so much of that poetry itself--and the course is officially "British Romantic Poetry" (and I just got the official course catalog title changed from "English" to "British"). Also, though F. does get taught outside of Romanticism, as Katherine observes, I tend to think students deserve our own (better!) perspective on it, and I'm reluctant to cede it to others. In the undergrad poetry survey, we usually do read some non-fiction prose too--Wollstonecraft (which doesn't help with the family affair problem, I realize), Burke, Hazlitt, etc.--but we have so little time for all the poetry I want to teach, and the students at my institution don't, I think, get enough poetry elsewhere in their coursework, so I'm happy to concentrate on that. For my graduate seminar in the fall, which I'll be structuring largely as a survey (of "British Romanticism"), I've ordered a few novels--Castle Rackrent, Persuasion, Zofloya, and Guy Mannering--and we'll split our time between novels and poetry, again with some non-fiction prose as well. These novels touch on topics we'll be pursuing across the various readings in our seminar--e.g., revolution & sexuality; ideas of history & time--but I'm also hoping to give students a strong sense of the range of Romantic writing across genres, styles and modes, so I tried to choose novels that might work well together but that would each feel unlike the others, too. Here, I decided against ordering Frankenstein--in part so that I could give more time to "fictions by people who aren't tied to the poets by familial alliances," as Deidre nicely puts it (although of course that depends which poets one means--I think we'll read at least some of the Lay of the Last Minstrel and maybe some of Charlotte Dacre's poetry too!).

I'd just like to register that....

I want to return to classes and take all of those described above and all over these blog posts. It would be thrilling to sit around a table and just talk about passages in Romantic-era literature.