Frankenstein: 0 (Norton Critical Editions) - Softcover

Almost two centuries after its publication, Frankenstein remains an indisputably classic text and Mary Shelley's finest work. This extensively revised Norton Critical Edition includes new texts and illustrative materials that convey the enduring global conversation about Frankenstein and its author. The text is that of the 1818 first edition, published in three volumes by Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, and Jones. It is accompanied by an expansive new preface, explanatory annotations, a map of Geneva and its environs, and seven illustrations, five of them new to the Second Edition. Context is provided in three supporting sections: "Circumstance, Influence, Composition, Revision," "Reception, Impact, Adaptation," and "Sources, Influences, Analogues." Among the Second Edition's new inclusions are historical-cultural studies by Susan Tyler Hitchcock, William St. Clair, and Elizabeth Young; Chris Baldrick on the novel's reception; and David Pirie on the novel's many film adaptations. Related excerpts from the Bible and from John Milton's Paradise Lost are now included, as is Charles Lamb's poem "The Old Familiar Faces." "Criticism" collects sixteen major interpretations of Frankenstein, nine of them new to the Second Edition. The new contributors are Peter Brooks, Bette London, Garrett Stewart, James. A. W. Heffernan, Patrick Brantlinger, Jonathan Bate, Anne Mellor, Jane Goodall, and Christa Knellwolf. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

J. Paul Hunter is Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe's Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe; Occasional Form: Henry Fielding and the Chains of Circumstance; and Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. He is author of the first nine editions of The Norton Introduction to Poetry and the long-time co-editor of The Norton Introduction to Literature and New Worlds of Literature.