The New Annotated Frankenstein

By Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Book Overview

"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

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0871409496
• ISBN13: 9780871409492
• Release Date: August 2017
• Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
• Length: 432 Pages
• Weight: 2.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 8.9" x 9.9"

Customer Reviews

"Cursed, cursed, creator." - The monster

Victor grew up reading the works of Paracelsus, Agrippa, and Albertus Magnus, the alchemists of the time. Toss in a little natural philosophy (sciences) and you have the making of a monster. Or at least a being that, after being spurned for looking ugly, becomes ugly. So, for revenge, the creature decides that unless Victor makes another (female this time) creature, Victor will also suffer the loss of friends and relatives. What is Victor to do? Bow to the wishes and needs of his creation? Or challenge it to “the death”? What would you do? Although the concept of the monster is good, and the conflicts of the story are well thought out, Shelly suffers from the writing style of the time. Many people do not finish the book as the language is stilted and verbose, for example, when was the last time you said, "Little did I then expect the calamity that was in a few moments to overwhelm me and extinguish in horror and despair all fear of ignominy of death." Much of the book seems like a travel log filler. More time is spent describing the surroundings of Europe than the reason for traveling or just traveling. Many writers use traveling to reflect time passing or the character growing in stature or knowledge. In this story, they just travel a lot. This book is worth plodding through for moviegoers. The record needs to be set straight. The first shock is that the creator is named Victor Frankenstein; the creature is just a "monster", not Frankenstein. It is Victor who is backward, which adds to his doing the impossible by not knowing any better. The monster is well-read in "Sorrows of a Young Werther," "Paradise Lost," and Plutarch's "Lives." The debate (mixed with a few murders) rages on as to whether the monster was doing evil because of his nature or because he was spurned.