"Because I'm teaching an intro-level course in comparative literature, this edition was extremely helpful in showing the variety of critical approaches that they can take toward a single text. The article on radical science also helped me compare Frankenstein to Alasdair Gray's Poor Things. I highly recommend this edition of Frankenstein and will use it in the future." -Joshua Beall, Rutgers University
Two centuries after its original publication, Mary Shelley’s classic tale of gothic horror comes to vivid life in "what may very well be the best presentation of the novel" to date (Guillermo del Toro). "Remarkably, a nineteen-year-old, writing her first novel, penned a tale that combines tragedy, morality, social commentary, and a thoughtful examination of the very nature of knowledge," writes best-selling author Leslie S. Klinger in his foreword to The New Annotated Frankenstein. Despite its undeniable status as one of the most influential works of fiction ever written, Mary Shelley’s novel is often reductively dismissed as the wellspring for tacky monster films or as a cautionary tale about experimental science gone haywire. Now, two centuries after the first publication of Frankenstein, Klinger revives Shelley’s gothic masterpiece by reproducing her original text with the most lavishly illustrated and comprehensively annotated edition to date. Featuring over 200 illustrations and nearly 1,000 annotations, this sumptuous volume recaptures Shelley’s early nineteenth-century world with historical precision and imaginative breadth, tracing the social and political roots of the author’s revolutionary brand of Romanticism. Braiding together decades of scholarship with his own keen insights, Klinger recounts Frankenstein’s indelible contributions to the realms of science fiction, feminist theory, and modern intellectual history—not to mention film history and popular culture. The result of Klinger’s exhaustive research is a multifaceted portrait of one of Western literature’s most divinely gifted prodigies, a young novelist who defied her era’s restrictions on female ambitions by independently supporting herself and her children as a writer and editor. Born in a world of men in the midst of a political and an emerging industrial revolution, Shelley crafted a horror story that, beyond its incisive commentary on her own milieu, is widely recognized as the first work of science fiction. The daughter of a pioneering feminist and an Enlightenment philosopher, Shelley lived and wrote at the center of British Romanticism, the “exuberant, young movement” that rebelled against tradition and reason and "with a rebellious scream gave birth to a world of gods and monsters" (del Toro). Following his best-selling The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft and The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Klinger not only considers Shelley’s original 1818 text but, for the first time in any annotated volume, traces the effects of her significant revisions in the 1823 and 1831 editions. With an afterword by renowned literary scholar Anne K. Mellor, The New Annotated Frankenstein celebrates the prescient genius and undying legacy of the world’s "first truly modern myth." The New Annotated Frankenstein includes: Nearly 1,000 notes that provide information and historical context on every aspect of Frankenstein and of Mary Shelley’s life Over 200 illustrations, including original artwork from the 1831 edition and dozens of photographs of real-world locations that appear in the novel Extensive listings of films and theatrical adaptations An introduction by Guillermo del Toro and an afterword by Anne K. Mellor
D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf’s edition of Frankenstein has been widely acclaimed as an outstanding edition of the novel—for the general reader and the student as much as for the scholar. The editors use as their copy-text the original 1818 version, and detail in an appendix all of Shelley’s later revisions. They also include a range of contemporary documents that shed light on the historical context from which this unique masterpiece emerged. New to this edition is a discussion of Percy Shelley’s role in contributing to the first draft of the novel. Recent scholarship has provoked considerable interest in the degree to which Percy Shelley contributed to Mary Shelley’s original text, and this edition’s updated introduction discusses this scholarship. A new appendix also includes Lord Byron’s “A Fragment” and John William Polidori’s The Vampyre, works that are engaging in their own right and that also add further insights into the literary context of Frankenstein.
This is the Revised 1831 Edition of FRANKENSTEIN; OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS, a novel written by the English author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley about the young science student Victor Frankenstein, who creates a grotesque but sentient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment. Shelley started writing the story when she was eighteen, and the novel was published when she was twenty. The first edition was published anonymously in London in 1818. Shelley's name appears on the second edition, published in France in 1823. Shelley had travelled through Europe in 1814, journeying along the river Rhine in Germany with a stop in Gernsheim which is just 17 km away from Frankenstein Castle, where, two centuries before, an alchemist was engaged in experiments. Later, she travelled in the region of Geneva (Switzerland)-where much of the story takes place-and the topic of galvanism and other similar occult ideas were themes of conversation among her companions, particularly her lover and future husband, Percy Shelley. Mary, Percy, Lord Byron, and John Polidori decided to have a competition to see who could write the best horror story. After thinking for days, Shelley dreamt about a scientist who created life and was horrified by what he had made; her dream later evolved into the novel's story. Shelley completed her writing in May 1817, and Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was first published on 11 March 1818 by the small London publishing house of Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones. The second edition of Frankenstein was published on 11 August 1822 in two volumes (by G. and W. B. Whittaker) following the success of the stage play Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein by Richard Brinsley Peake; this edition credited Mary Shelley as the author. On 31 October 1831, the first "popular" edition in one volume appeared, published by Henry Colburn & Richard Bentley. This edition was heavily revised by Mary Shelley, partially because of pressure to make the story more conservative, and included a new, longer preface by her, presenting a somewhat embellished version of the genesis of the story. This edition tends to be the one most widely read now, although editions containing the original 1818 text are still published. Many scholars prefer the 1818 text, arguing that it preserves the spirit of Shelley's original publication.
Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein when she was only eighteen. At once a Gothic thriller, a passionate romance, and a cautionary tale about the dangers of science, Frankenstein tells the story of committed science student Victor Frankenstein. Obsessed with discovering the cause of generation and life and bestowing animation upon lifeless matter, Frankenstein assembles a human being from stolen body parts but; upon bringing it to life, he recoils in horror at the creature's hideousness. Tormented by isolation and loneliness, the once-innocent creature turns to evil and unleashes a campaign of murderous revenge against his creator, Frankenstein.Frankenstein, an instant bestseller and an important ancestor of both the horror and science fiction genres, not only tells a terrifying story, but also raises profound, disturbing questions about the very nature of life and the place of humankind within the cosmos: What does it mean to be human? What responsibilities do we have to each other? How far can we go in tampering with Nature? In our age, filled with news of organ donation genetic engineering, and bio-terrorism, these questions are more relevant than ever.
Frankenstein is a novel by Mary Shelley. It was first published in 1818. Ever since its publication, the story of Frankenstein has remained brightly in the imagination of the readers and literary circles across the countries. In the novel, an English explorer in the Arctic, who assists Victor Frankenstein on the final leg of his chase, tells the story. As a talented young medical student, Frankenstein strikes upon the secret of endowing life to the dead. He becomes obsessed with the idea that he might make a man. The Outcome is a miserable and an outcast who seeks murderous revenge for his condition. Frankenstein pursues him when the creature flees. It is at this juncture t that Frankenstein meets the explorer and recounts his story, dying soon after. Although it has been adapted into films numerous times, they failed to effectively convey the stark horror and philosophical vision of the novel. Shelley's novel is a combination of Gothic horror story and science fiction.
Mary Shelley's classic on man's blasphemous attempt to create life is accompanied by commentary on the author and the stylistic, thematic, and mythic aspects of the novel.
Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, Catholic University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, language: English, abstract: The Gothic novel "Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus" is the result of Mary Shelley's travels to Geneva, Switzerland, with her future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Dr. John Polidori and Lord Byron, themselves famous authors, and an entertaining contest between those friends about who could write the best horror story. Conceived of a nightmare after reading German ghost stories by the fire and conversing about Darwinism, occult ideas, galvanism and science, the only nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley put this piece of art down on paper and published it anonymously in 1818. Frankenstein is a novel with a complex narrative structure. In the core of the novel the Creature's story is presented to us framed by Victor Frankenstein's story which itself is enframed by Robert Walton's epistolary narrative. The overall structure of the novel is symmetrical: it begins with the letters of Walton, shifts to Victor's tale, then to the Creature's narration, so as to switch to Victor again and end with the records of Walton. In this manner the reader gets different versions of the same story from different perspectives. Mary Shelley's rather atypical approach not to stick to only one narrator and one defined narrative situation throughout the book creates various impressions on the reader of the novel. The narrative situation of a text describes the structure of how the content, plot, characters and events are being mediated to the reader and is often referred to as the point of view. The narrative situation is one of the main categories in literary analysis. One of the most important academics who concerned himself with the systematisation of narrative structures since the 1950s is the Austrian literary theorist Dr. Franz Karl Stanzel (*1923). There is strong competition by the typology of Gérard Genette since the 1990s, however, Stanzel's theory is being taught to date, which is why it is used in the following analysis of the narrative structure in Frankenstein and its effect on the reader.
