An evocative portrait of Mary Shelley captures the turbulent and dramatic life of a woman who, at the age of sixteen, eloped with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, dealt with the loss of four children and tragic drowning of her husband, and created the world's most imaginative literary monster in Frankenst[...]
In 1980, deconstructive and psychoanalytic literary theorist Barbara Johnson wrote an essay on Mary Shelley for a colloquium on the writings of Jacques Derrida. The essay marked the beginning of Johnson's lifelong interest in Shelley as well as her first foray into the field of "women's studies," o[...]
From her youth, Mary Shelley immersed herself in the social contract tradition, particularly the educational and political theories of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as the radical philosophies of her parents, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the anarchist William Godwin. Against [...]
The story of Frankenstein's creator is a strange, romantic, and tragic one, as deeply compelling as the novel itself. Mary ran away to Lake Geneva with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley when she was just sixteen. It was there, during a cold and wet summer, that she first imagined her story about a mad s[...]
Frankenstein is probably the most famous horror story in the world. Victor Frankenstein is a young scientist who creates a monster from parts of dead bodies. At first the monster looks for love and wants to be kind. But soon, he learns to hate people and becomes evil. Frankenstein has learnt how to [...]
A stunning, enduring horror story about the dangers of Science, as the ambitious Victor Frankenstein takes his powers of creation too far and pays a terrible price when he gives life to a terrible monster. Heartbreaking, darkly funny and full of striking gothic images, FRANKENSTEIN is a true classic[...]
When an essay is due and dreaded exams loom, here's the lit-crit help students need to succeed! SparkNotes Literature Guides make studying smarter, better, and faster. They provide chapter-by-chapter analysis, explanations of key themes, motifs, and symbols, a review quiz and essay topics. Lively an[...]
The premier monster story of English literaturea tale of science pursued to horrifying extremes An origin story nearly as famous as the book itself: One dreary summer on the shores of Lake Geneva, amid discussions of galvanism and the occult and fireside readings from a collection of German ghost st[...]
A young scientist has created a living being out of dead flesh and bone. His creation, however, turns out to be a frightful monster Now, Victor Frankenstein must stop his creation before the monster s loneliness turns to violence. These reader-favorite tiles are now updated for enhanced Common Core[...]
The idea for the story came to the author, Mary Shelley, in a dream she had about a scientist who had created life and was horrified by what he had made. This Gothic-style romance is among the first of true science fiction novels, if not the first. A young scientist named Victor Frankenstein, after [...]