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Overview
BookDoors’ FRANKENSTEIN IS the most exactingly, extensively annotated edition of Mary Shelley's novel available in print or online. Designed exclusively as an eBook, this and the other BookDoors In Context editions afford you swift, seamless access to information and commentary.
The modest price underscores BookDoors' mission to make these works accessible to an audience of widely different experience and expectations (please see bookdoors.com) . The “Literature in Its Context” series aspires to provide today’s reader with the knowledge an informed reader of 1816 possessed and that Mary Godwin Shelley took for granted.
As you read you'll have, should you wish, an interpretive discussion of FRANKENSTEIN, one of the landmarks of fiction in the West and the original of a now universal myth. You’ll also find illustrations, a Glossary, a time-line that includes cultural, scientific, and technological developments from 1770 to 1817, a selective bibliography. Some of the annotations include illustrations and some are short essays exploring, for instance, the novel's theological and political context, the history of galvanism and the Vitalism controversy, Percy Shelley's relevant poems, and the bearing Mary Godwin Shelley's father's philosophy has upon the novel. Her parents, the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who died giving birth to Mary, and William Godwin, also a novelist, along with her husband-to-be, Percy, influence the shape Mary's vision assumes. Many of the annotations and commentary have also been divided into categories that can be searched independently, such as Gender, Education, Body, Mind, Class, Manners & Morals, and Reading & Writing.
To help the reader, the annotations have been divided into into three types, those having to do with words, those with the historical context, and those inviting discussion. The novel's language is not always familiar. Words, themselves, have changed, disappeared, or are simply arcane. such as noisome, chimerical, siroc, furies, sophisms, aiguilles, and exordiium.
The second sort of annotation examines the historical context in which Shelley sets the novel, including her life and its convergences with her fiction, the novel’s social and cultural context, and in her case its literary and especially scientific context. The last, which extends to alchemy, is crucial to understanding Shelley's intentions, the taboos surrounding the creation of life from dead organic matter, and the implications, captured in the Vitalism controversy, such as whether we're born with a soul, whether we have free will, and what impact our earliest life has upon us. The literary context--Greek mythology, PARADISE LOST, Goethe's SORROWS, THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER, Rousseau's "novels" of education, and Byron and Percy Shelley's poetry--shapes and radiates through the novel. A reader gains immeasurably by having a sense of the scientific context of the half-century or so before the 19-year-old Mary Shelley began it: the remarkable developments in chemistry, astronomy (and ballooning), medicine, anatomy and a rudimentary neurology.
A third level addresses FRANKENSTEIN as a work of the Romantic literary imagination, a novel that has attracted much attention especially from feminist, psychoanalytic, and historicist critics. The commentary focuses upon the novel’s diction, structure as an epistolary novel, its motifs, sub-texts, presiding ideas, and its connections with Romantic literature. Incidentally, the annotations never divulge or anticipate the plot yet to unfold.
For more information and for the opportunity to read for free, look at other titles, and to test drive BookDoors’ agile search engine, please visit bookdoors.com.
The modest price underscores BookDoors' mission to make these works accessible to an audience of widely different experience and expectations (please see bookdoors.com) . The “Literature in Its Context” series aspires to provide today’s reader with the knowledge an informed reader of 1816 possessed and that Mary Godwin Shelley took for granted.
As you read you'll have, should you wish, an interpretive discussion of FRANKENSTEIN, one of the landmarks of fiction in the West and the original of a now universal myth. You’ll also find illustrations, a Glossary, a time-line that includes cultural, scientific, and technological developments from 1770 to 1817, a selective bibliography. Some of the annotations include illustrations and some are short essays exploring, for instance, the novel's theological and political context, the history of galvanism and the Vitalism controversy, Percy Shelley's relevant poems, and the bearing Mary Godwin Shelley's father's philosophy has upon the novel. Her parents, the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who died giving birth to Mary, and William Godwin, also a novelist, along with her husband-to-be, Percy, influence the shape Mary's vision assumes. Many of the annotations and commentary have also been divided into categories that can be searched independently, such as Gender, Education, Body, Mind, Class, Manners & Morals, and Reading & Writing.
To help the reader, the annotations have been divided into into three types, those having to do with words, those with the historical context, and those inviting discussion. The novel's language is not always familiar. Words, themselves, have changed, disappeared, or are simply arcane. such as noisome, chimerical, siroc, furies, sophisms, aiguilles, and exordiium.
The second sort of annotation examines the historical context in which Shelley sets the novel, including her life and its convergences with her fiction, the novel’s social and cultural context, and in her case its literary and especially scientific context. The last, which extends to alchemy, is crucial to understanding Shelley's intentions, the taboos surrounding the creation of life from dead organic matter, and the implications, captured in the Vitalism controversy, such as whether we're born with a soul, whether we have free will, and what impact our earliest life has upon us. The literary context--Greek mythology, PARADISE LOST, Goethe's SORROWS, THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER, Rousseau's "novels" of education, and Byron and Percy Shelley's poetry--shapes and radiates through the novel. A reader gains immeasurably by having a sense of the scientific context of the half-century or so before the 19-year-old Mary Shelley began it: the remarkable developments in chemistry, astronomy (and ballooning), medicine, anatomy and a rudimentary neurology.
A third level addresses FRANKENSTEIN as a work of the Romantic literary imagination, a novel that has attracted much attention especially from feminist, psychoanalytic, and historicist critics. The commentary focuses upon the novel’s diction, structure as an epistolary novel, its motifs, sub-texts, presiding ideas, and its connections with Romantic literature. Incidentally, the annotations never divulge or anticipate the plot yet to unfold.
For more information and for the opportunity to read for free, look at other titles, and to test drive BookDoors’ agile search engine, please visit bookdoors.com.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940012750273 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | bookdoors |
| Publication date: | 05/13/2011 |
| Series: | Literature in Context , #7 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
From the Introduction: Mary, who'd just turned 15, met Percy, 20, after she returned from Scotland. He came to dinner at the Godwins with his wife, Harriet, and his sister-in-law, Eliza Westbrook, who lived with the couple. Tthis was not uncommon but assumed a more bohemian arrangement with Shelley, who enjoyed the company of women and especially one whom he could idolize as a muse for the poetic imagination. Shelley had grown up in a wealthy home, the lone male child with four worshipful sisters. Although Mary remained in London until June before returning to Scotland, there were no further visits with Percy, and it was March, 1814, before she returned from Dundee to London.
She first saw Shelley again in early May; she was nearly seventeen, he nearly twenty-two. Though the father of an infant and his wife pregnant, Shelley was by now entirely disaffected from his marriage and considering a separation, and Mary was an intellectually alive, lovely, and impressionable young woman. There were several dinners at the house until within the next month he was eating there daily. The visits extended to taking walks together, accompanied by Jane, whose destination was Mary Wollstonecraft's grave in St. Pancras Churchyard. Mary told Percy she loved him and he instantly reciprocated. Given both of her parents' views on formal marriage as civil bondage, her love for Percy and his for her expressed their bold, joyous authenticity. The attraction between them was intense, and they appear to have made love shortly after. Godwin, who soon learned of the relationship, sought to end it by writing to Shelley and refusing to allow Mary to see him. But appearing at the house, Shelley, before Mary, Jane, and Mrs. Godwin, threatened to kill himself, and Mary surrendered. Accompanied by Jane, they eloped or absconded to France on July 18, 1814, each of the three setting out in the most audacious way upon a new life.
Or almost. The intrepid Mrs. Godwin pursued them to Calais, remonstrated with all but seemed to have convinced Jane to return, until Shelley persuaded her to continue with Mary and him. Jane's staying altered her life radically (she'd have a child by Byron), and deformed Mary Shelley's, who grew to loathe her, in part because some months later Shelley began a protracted affair with Jane. Frankenstein, like Genesis and Blake's Urizen, hinges on a creation myth, but the story of Frankenstein's own creation. its genesis, rivals the novel's story.
She first saw Shelley again in early May; she was nearly seventeen, he nearly twenty-two. Though the father of an infant and his wife pregnant, Shelley was by now entirely disaffected from his marriage and considering a separation, and Mary was an intellectually alive, lovely, and impressionable young woman. There were several dinners at the house until within the next month he was eating there daily. The visits extended to taking walks together, accompanied by Jane, whose destination was Mary Wollstonecraft's grave in St. Pancras Churchyard. Mary told Percy she loved him and he instantly reciprocated. Given both of her parents' views on formal marriage as civil bondage, her love for Percy and his for her expressed their bold, joyous authenticity. The attraction between them was intense, and they appear to have made love shortly after. Godwin, who soon learned of the relationship, sought to end it by writing to Shelley and refusing to allow Mary to see him. But appearing at the house, Shelley, before Mary, Jane, and Mrs. Godwin, threatened to kill himself, and Mary surrendered. Accompanied by Jane, they eloped or absconded to France on July 18, 1814, each of the three setting out in the most audacious way upon a new life.
Or almost. The intrepid Mrs. Godwin pursued them to Calais, remonstrated with all but seemed to have convinced Jane to return, until Shelley persuaded her to continue with Mary and him. Jane's staying altered her life radically (she'd have a child by Byron), and deformed Mary Shelley's, who grew to loathe her, in part because some months later Shelley began a protracted affair with Jane. Frankenstein, like Genesis and Blake's Urizen, hinges on a creation myth, but the story of Frankenstein's own creation. its genesis, rivals the novel's story.
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