Frankenstein or `The Modern Prometheus': The 1818 Text (Oxford World's Classics) - Softcover

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0199537151 ISBN 13: 9780199537150

Publisher: OUP Oxford, 2008

Synopsis

Frankenstein was Mary Shelley's immensely powerful contribution to the ghost stories which she, Percy Shelley, and Byron wrote one wet summer in Switzerland. Its protagonist is a young student of natural philosophy, who learns the secret of imparting life to a creature constructed from relics of the dead, with horrific consequences.

Frankenstein confronts some of the most feared innovations of evolutionism: topics such as degeneracy, hereditary disease, and mankind's status as a species of animal. The text used here is from the 1818 edition, which is a mocking exposé of leaders and achievers who leave desolation in their wake, showing mankind its choice - to live cooperatively or to die of selfishness. It is also a black comedy, and harder and wittier than the 1831 version with which we are more familiar.

Drawing on new research, Marilyn Butler examines the novel in the context of the radical sciences, which were developing among much controversy in the years following the Napoleonic Wars, and shows how Frankenstein's experiment relates to a contemporary debate between the champions of materialist science and of received religion.

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About this title

About the Author

Marilyn Butler is King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at King's College, Cambridge. She is the author of Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries (1981) and co-editor of Pickering's Works of Mary Wollstonecraft (1989). She has also edited Mary Shelley's The last Man, published in World's Classics in 1994.

Edition details

• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0199537151
• ISBN 13: 9780199537150
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336
• Editor: Butler Marilyn