Used
Paperback
1996
$3.39
Almost two centuries after its publication, Frankenstein remains an indisputably classic text and Mary Shelley's finest work. This extensively revised Norton Critical Edition includes new texts and illustrative materials that convey the enduring global conversation about Frankenstein and its author. The text is that of the 1818 first edition, published in three volumes by Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, and Jones. It is accompanied by an expansive new preface, explanatory annotations, a map of Geneva and its environs, and seven illustrations, five of them new to the Second Edition. Context is provided in three supporting sections: Circumstance, Influence, Composition, Revision, Reception, Impact, Adaptation, and Sources, Influences, Analogues. Among the Second Edition's new inclusions are historical-cultural studies by Susan Tyler Hitchcock, William St. Clair, and Elizabeth Young; Chris Baldrick on the novel's reception; and David Pirie on the novel's many film adaptations. Related excerpts from the Bible and from John Milton's Paradise Lost are now included, as is Charles Lamb's poem The Old Familiar Faces.
Criticism collects sixteen major interpretations of Frankenstein, nine of them new to the Second Edition. The new contributors are Peter Brooks, Bette London, Garrett Stewart, James. A. W. Heffernan, Patrick Brantlinger, Jonathan Bate, Anne Mellor, Jane Goodall, and Christa Knellwolf. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.
New
Paperback
1982
$17.36
'I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.' A summer evening's ghost stories, lonely insomnia in a moonlit Alpine's room, and a runaway imagination -- fired by philosophical discussions with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley about science, galvanism, and the origins of life -- conspired to produce for Mary Shelley this haunting night specter. By morning, it had become the germ of her Romantic masterpiece, Frankenstein. Written in 1816 when she was only 19, Mary Shelley's novel of 'The Modern Prometheus' chillingly dramatized the dangerous potential of life begotten upon a laboratory table. A frightening creation myth for our own time, Frankenstein remains one of the greatest horror stories ever written and is an undisputed classic of its kind.