From the Longman Cultural Editions series, this second edition of Frankenstein presents Mary Shelley's remarkable novel in several provocative and illuminating contexts: cultural, critical, and literary.
Series Editor Susan J. Wolfson presents the 1818 version of Mary Shelley's famous novel in its cultural and historical contexts. Like all great works of fiction, Frankenstein gains depth and dimension from its "conversation" with contemporary texts, especially those by Shelley's own parents, husband, and friends. A lively introduction is complemented by a chronology coordinating Shelley's life with key historical events and a speculative calendar of the novel's events in the late eighteenth century. In addition to the 1818 text, this cultural edition features the introduction to and a sample revision of the 1831 version. New to this Edition is Frankentalk, a section of selected references to Frankenstein in the popular press, and the complete text of Richard Brinsley Peake's Frankenstein, A Romantic Drama, the first stage version of Frankenstein.
List of Illustrations
About Longman Cultural Editions
About This Edition
Introduction
Table of Dates
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
Volume I
Volume II
Volume III
from Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1831)
M. W. S.'s Introduction
Some Additions to Robert Walton's first letters
Some Additions and Revisions to Victor Frankenstein's Narrative
Victor's childhood and the adoption of Elizabeth victor's enchantment with occult science and his encounter with modern science victor's departure for University of Ingolstadt Clerval's straits victor meets Professors Krempe and Waldman victor's health suffers Elizabeth's report on Ernest Frankenstein Clerval's lament for William Victor's anguish over Justine and William?shy;Victor's continuing agony Creature's story of framing Justine] victor's plans for a second creature Clerval's imperial ambitions victor's apprehensions for his family, his longing for oblivion victor's secret
Contexts
Monsters, Visionaries, and Mary Shelley
Aesthetic Adventures
Edmund Burke on The Sublime and the Beautiful
Mary Wollstonecraft on Burke's genderings
William Gilpin on The Picturesque?nbsp;
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere (1798)
Mary Wollstonecraft, from Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman: Jemima's story
Mary Godwin (Shelley), from her journal of 1815: the death of her first baby
Percy Bysshe Shelley, from Alasto; or, The Spirit of Solitude
Mary Shelley, with Percy Bysshe Shelley, from History of a Six Weeks?Tour: Alpine scenery
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mont Blanc
George Gordon, Lord Byron
from Manfred, A Dramatic Poem
from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto the Third: Alpine thunderstorm
Leigh Hunt, from Blue-Stocking Revels, or The Feast of the Violets
Dr. Benjamin Spock, from Baby and Child Care
The Story-Telling Compact
George Gordon, Lord Byron, A Fragment
John William Polidori, The Vampyre
God, Adam, and Satan
Genesis: chapters 2 and 3 (King James Bible)
John Milton, from Paradise Lost
William Godwin, from Political Justice
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Prometheus
William Hazlitt, remarks on Satan, from Lectures on the
English Poet
Percy Bysshe Shelley
from Prometheus Unbound
from A Defence of Poetry
Richard Brinsley Peake, Frankenstein, A Romantic Drama in Three Acts
Reviews and Reactions
[John Wilson Croker], Quarterly Review, January 1818
[Walter Scott], Blackwood's Edinburgh Review, March 1818
(Scot's) Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany, March 1818
Belle Assembly, March 1818
British Critic, April 1818
Gentleman's Magazine, April 1818
Monthly Review, April 1818
Literary Panorama, June 1818
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, March 1823
London Morning Post, reviews of Peake's Frankenstein, July 1823
George Canning, remarks in Parliament, March 1824
Knight's Quarterly Magazine, August 1824
London Literary Gazette, 1831
[Percy Bysshe Shelley, posthumous], Anthen?m, November 1832
Frankentalk: Frankenstein in the Popular Press of Today
Further Reading and Viewing
Susan J. Wolfson is professor of English at Princeton University. In addition to this present volume, her editorial work includes Felicia Hemans (Princeton UP, 2000) and the Longman Cultural Edition of John Keats. With Claudia Johnson, she is coeditor of the Longman Cultural Edition of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. With Peter Manning, she is coeditor of the Romantics volume in The Longman Anthology of British Literature, and Selected Poems of Lord Byron (Penguin, 2005). Her critical books include the prize-winning Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford UP, 1997) and Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism (Stanford UP, 2007).
