Known from her day to ours as ?the Author of Frankenstein?, Mary Shelley indeed created one of the central myths of modernity. But she went on to survive all manner of upheaval - personal, political, and professional ? and to produce an oeuvre of bracing intelligence and wide cultural sweep. The Ca[...]
On the bicentennial of Frankenstein, join Mary Shelley on the night she created the most frightening monster the world has ever seen. On a stormy night two hundred years ago, a young woman sat in a dark house and dreamed of her life as a writer. She longed to follow the path her own mother, Mary Wo[...]
"I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion." A summer evening's ghost stories, lonel[...]
Slowly I learnt the ways of humans: how to ruin, how to hate, how to debase, how to humiliate. And at the feet of my master I learnt the highest of human skills, the skill no other creature owns: I finally learnt how to lie. Childlike in his innocence but grotesque in form, Frankenstein's bewildered[...]
York Notes Advanced offer a fresh and accessible approach to English Literature. This market-leading series has been completely updated to meet the needs of today's A-level and undergraduate students, introducing them to more sophisticated analysis, a range of critical perspectives and wider contex[...]
The story of Victor Frankenstein and the monstrous creature he created has held readers spellbound ever since it was published almost two centuries ago. On the surface, it is a novel of tense and steadily mounting horror; but on a more profound level, it offers searching illumination of the human co[...]
""It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open...""
What you create can destroy you.
One freezing morning, a lone man wa[...]
First published in 1818, Frankenstein has spellbound, disturbed, and fascinated readers for generations. One of the most haunting and enduring works ever written in English, it has inspired numerous retellings and sequels in virtually every medium, making the Frankenstein myth familiar even to those[...]
No-one in the grip of Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, with its mythic-minded hero and its highly sympathetic monster who reads Goethe and longs to be at peace with himself, can fail to notice how much more excellent the original is than all the adaptations, imitations and outright plagiarisms which hav[...]
Presents the story of Dr. Frankenstein and his obsessive experiment that leads to the creation of a monstrous and deadly creature.[...]
Everyone is familiar with Mary Shelley's classic novel, but no one has read it like this! "Frankenstein" is the long celebrated gothic tale of a science experiment gone awry. But in this brand-new edition, Shelley's haunting horror story is transformed with the addition of steampunk-inspired art. Wi[...]
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 [...]
A powerful masterpiece from the gothic pen of Mary Shelley. Victor Frankenstein is a man of science obsessed with the idea of creating life. So much so, that he creates a giant, human-like being out of a patchwork of corpses. However on achieving his miracle, Frankenstein finds himself horrified at [...]
A brilliant, early dystopian tale of classic science fiction. The Last Man is a powerful, post-apocalyptic tale and precurser to the much later science fiction novels of H.G. Wells, George Orwell, Phillip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison amongst others. Overshadowed by the titanic success of Frankenstein,[...]
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[...]