Before Frankenstein

Therese Huber’s Abentheuer auf einer Reise nach Neu-Holland (1793–94) was the first European novel to be set in the Antipodes, emerging directly out of post-revolutionary German romanticism. It ventriloquises the voice of Huber’s estranged husband, Georg Forster, a revolutionary, naturalist and Pacific voyager, to tell the story of Forster’s return to Australia, and thence to imagine a mode of liberation centred on family and community rather than the nation-state or cosmopolitan politics. The newly established penal colony is constructed as a terra nullius in which ‘love and humanity’ as well as sacrifice can replace the old hierarchical social order. This essay explores unnoticed connections between Huber’s European and female-orientated colonialist fantasy of Australian emptiness and the emerging genre of the political novel in Britain, as spearheaded by William Godwin and his circle and as later developed in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). It does so in order to acknowledge and affirm Huber’s neglected German-language contribution to the early Australian literary archive and to extend our understanding of the global dynamics that underpinned emerging eighteenth-century literary forms

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