Introductory:

Andrew Smith, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein (Cambridge, 2016), esp. chs.3-6 (on different ways of historicising the novel), 9 (on race)

Specialist readings:

Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing (Oxford, 1987) – see e.g. pp. 54–5 & 121–40 on the creature as representation of an incipient proletariat

Elizabeth A. Bohls, ‘Standards of Taste, Discourses of “Race”, and the Aesthetic Education of a Monster: Critique of Empire in Frankenstein’, Eighteenth-Century Life 18:3 (1994), 23–36

Fred Botting, ‘Reflections of Excess: Frankenstein, the French Revolution and Monstrosity’, in Alison Yarrington & Kelvin Everest, eds., Reflections of Revolution: Images of Romanticism (London, 1993), 26-38

Marilyn Butler, ‘The First Frankenstein and Radical Science’, Times Literary Supplement 9 Apr. 1993

Pamela Clemit, The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley (Oxford, 1993)

—, ‘Frankenstein and Matilda: The Legacies of Godwin and Wollstonecraft’, in Esther Schor, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley (Cambridge, 2003), 26-44

Adriana Craciun, ‘Writing the Disaster: Franklin and Frankenstein’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 65:4 (2011), 433-80

Denise Gigante, ‘Facing the Ugly: The Case of Frankenstein’, ELH 67 (2000), 565-87

H.L. Malchow, ‘Frankenstein’s Monster and Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Past and Present 139 (1993), 90-130

Franco Moretti, ‘The Dialectic of Fear’, New Left Review I/136 (1982), 67-85

Jessica Richard, ‘“A Paradise of My Own Creation”: Frankenstein and the Improbable Romance of Polar Exploration’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 25:4 (2003), 295-314

Allan Lloyd Smith, ‘“This Thing of Darkness”: Racial Discourse in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’, Gothic Studies, 6:2 (November 2004), 208–22

William St. Clair, ‘The Impact of Frankenstein’ in Betty T. Bennett & Stuart Curran, eds., Mary Shelley in Her Times (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 38–63

Joyce Zonana, ‘They Will Prove the Truth of My Tale: Safie’s Letters as the Feminist Core of Shelley’s Frankenstein’. Journal of Narrative Technique 21:2 (1991) 170–84