This Norton Critical Edition of Mary Shelley's gothic masterpiece is based on the 1818 first edition text, published in three volumes by Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, and Jones. This text represents what Frankenstein's first readers encountered and is the text favored by scholars.Throughout, the editor provides useful explanatory annotation. A map of the region helps readers locate the novel's many settings. In "Composition and Revision," a special critical section, M.K. Joseph and Anne K. Mellor address the issues surrounding teachers' choice of text.
Contemporary perspective is provided in two supporting sections. "Contexts" includes related writings by Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John William Polidori. "Nineteenth-Century Responses" gathers six reactions to Frankenstein's publication from the years 1818 to 1886, including those by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Hugh Reginald Haweis.
"Criticism" is a collection of twelve seminal essays that provide a variety of perspectives on Frankenstein by Christopher Small, George Levine, Ellen Moers, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Barbara Johnson, Mary Poovey, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, William Veeder, Anne K. Mellor, Susan Winnett, Marilyn Butler, and Lawrence Lipking. The emphasis is on range—both critical (psychoanalytic, mythic, new historicist, and feminist essays are included) and chronological (essays span the last thirty years).
A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.
Editorial Reviews
"[T]he novel Frankenstein is quite a read. . . .It's highly Romantic, in the literary sense. . .[there is] a good deal of attractive torment and self-doubt, from both Victor Frankenstein and his creation. . . .If ever a book needed to be placed in context, it's Frankenstein." —James Hynes, The New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin on August 30, 1797 in London, the daughter of William Godwin--a radical philosopher and novelist, and Mary Wollstonecraft--a renowned feminist and the author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She eloped to France with Shelley in 1814, although they were not married until 1816, after the suicide of his first wife. She began work on Frankenstein in 1816 in Switzerland, while they were staying with Lord Byron, and it was published in 1818 to immediate acclaim. She died in London in 1851.
J. Paul Hunter is Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe; Occasional Form: Henry Fielding and the Chains of Circumstance; and Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. He is author of the first nine editions of The Norton Introduction to Poetry and the long-time co-editor of The Norton Introduction to Literature and New Worlds of Literature.
