Frankenstein (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (36 page)

The church yard scene, in which Frankenstein visits the tombs of his family, his quitting Geneva and his journey thro’ Tartary to the shores of the Frozen Ocean, resembles at once the terrible reanimation of a corpse, and the supernatural career of a spirit. The scene in the cabin of Walton’s ship, the more than mortal enthusiasm and grandeur of the Being’s speech over the dead body of his victim, is an exhibition of intellectual and imaginative power, which we think the reader will acknowledge has seldom been surpassed.

-from the Athenaeum
(November 10, 1832)

1. What can be understood from what the monster reads? The collection of books he finds in the woods takes us from the spiritual history of the world to imperial decline to the concentrated essence of Romanticism. Does the monster’s reading lead him astray or equip him to deal with the world?

2. How does the way in which the story of Frankenstein is told-that is, through letters and the characters’ speech-affect one’s reading of the novel?

3. Frankenstein and many derivative books and films have been immensely popular. There is something about this story and its spin-offs that gets to us. What is it? The danger of scientific Promethianism-that is, daring to go beyond the realm of man and into that of the divine? The pathos of being an outcast? Fear of the dead coming to life and seeking revenge? The monster’s character as a marauding embodiment of our unconscious rage?

Falkner. A Novel. 3 vols. London: Saunders and Otley, 1837.

The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, A Romance. 3 vols. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830.

Frankenstein; or, The Modem Prometheus. 3 vols. London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mayor, and Jones, 1818. The original text, including Percy Shelley’s “Preface” (written in Mary’s voice).

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831. Shelley’s revised edition of the 1818 text, with a new “Author’s Introduction.”

The
Last
Man. 3 vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1826.

Lodore. 3 vols. London: Richard Bentley, 1835.

Mathilda. Edited by Elizabeth Nitchie. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 19 5 9 . Shelley wrote this novel in 1819 and 1820; because her father, William Godwin, was outraged by the incest theme, he suppressed its publication. This is the first published edition.

Valperga: or, the Life and
Adventures
of
Castruccio,
Prince of Lucca. 3 vols. London: G. and W. B. Whittaker, 1823.

The Journals of Mary Shelley: 1814-1844. 2 vols. Edited by Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.

The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. 3 vols. Edited by Betty T. Bennett. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 19 8 0-19 8 8.

For a more thorough list, see Shelley’s reading lists for the period 1814-1818 in The Journals of Mary Shelley, volume 1, pages 85-103.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Christabel and Other Poems. 1816.

Davy, Sir Humphry. Elements of Chemical Philosophy. 1812.

Godwin, William. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness. 17 9 3 .

^__________
. Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 1798.

- Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams. 1794.

Goethe, Johann Wilhelm von. Die Leiden des jungen Werthers [The Sorrows of Werter]. 1774; translated 1779.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. 1667.

Plutarch. Parallel Lives. c.120 A.D.; translated 1579.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques.
Émile.
1762; read in French by Shelley.

Volney, Constantin François de Chasseboeuf, comte de. Les ruines; ou, Meditation sur les revolutions des empires. 1791; read in French by Shelley.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. 1787.

. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 1792.

. Maria, or, The Wrongs of Woman. 1798.

Baldick, Chris. In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. The role of politics and technology in the creation of Shelley’s monster.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. Part of the Modern Critical Interpretations series; a collection of notable essays that includes important feminist criticism by Barbara Johnson and Margaret Homans.

Forry, Steven Earl. Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations of Frankenstein from Mary Shelley to the Present. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. Illustrated study of Frankenstein’s appearance and reception on stage and screen, with full texts of seven plays (including Presumption) .

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. A foundational work of feminism that includes a chapter on Frankenstein.

Levine, George, and U. C. Knoepflmacher, eds. The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. The first collection of scholarly essays on Frankenstein; includes Ellen Moers’s “Female Gothic” and Peter Brooks’s “Godlike Science/ Unhallowed Arts: Language, Nature, and Monstrosity.”

Marshall, Tim. Murdering to Dissect: Grave-Robbing, Frankenstein, and the Anatomy Literature. Manchester, UK, and New York: Manchester University Press and St. Martin’s Press, 1995. A study of the relationship between crime, medicine, and the concept of the human body during Shelley’s time.

Mellor, Anne. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. New York: Methuen, 19 8 8. Important study of the creation of Frankenstein, with special attention to Percy Shelley’s role.

Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Indispensable feminist critique of the work of mother and daughter.

Shaw, Debra Benita. Women, Science, and Fiction: The Frankenstein Inheritance. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Shelley’s influence on science-fiction writers.

Smith, Johanna M. Mary Shelley. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996. A thorough survey of Mary Shelley’s writings, including plays, poems, and literary biographies that are still on the margins of critical discussion.

Spark, Muriel. Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary
Wollstonecraft
Shelley. Had-leigh, Essex, United Kingdom: Tower Bridge Publications, 1951. The biography that introduced Shelley as a subject for serious academic study.

Sunstein, Emily W. Mary Shelley: Romance
and
Reality. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989. A prize-winning biography of Shelley.