Frankenstein,3rd Edition (Broadview Editions) - Softcover

Shelley, Mary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1554811031 ISBN 13: 9781554811038

Publisher: Broadview Press, 2012

Synopsis

D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf’s edition of Frankenstein has been widely acclaimed as an outstanding edition of the novel―for the general reader and the student as much as for the scholar. The editors use as their copy-text the original 1818 version, and detail in an appendix all of Shelley’s later revisions. They also include a range of contemporary documents that shed light on the historical context from which this unique masterpiece emerged.

New to this edition is a discussion of Percy Shelley’s role in contributing to the first draft of the novel. Recent scholarship has provoked considerable interest in the degree to which Percy Shelley contributed to Mary Shelley’s original text, and this edition’s updated introduction discusses this scholarship. A new appendix also includes Lord Byron’s “A Fragment” and John William Polidori’s The Vampyre, works that are engaging in their own right and that also add further insights into the literary context of Frankenstein.

About this title

Review

Frankenstein, loved by many decades of readers and praised by such eminent literary critics as Harold Bloom, seems hardly to need a recommendation. If you haven't read it recently, though, you may not remember the sweeping force of the prose, the grotesque, surreal imagery, and the multilayered doppelgänger themes of Mary Shelley's masterpiece. As fantasy writer Jane Yolen writes of this (the reviewer's favorite) edition, "The strong black and whites of the main text [illustrations] are dark and brooding, with unremitting shadows and stark contrasts. But the central conversation with the monster--who owes nothing to the overused movie image ... but is rather the novel's charnel-house composite--is where [Barry] Moser's illustrations show their greatest power ... The viewer can all but smell the powerful stench of the monster's breath as its words spill out across the page. Strong book-making for one of the world's strongest and most remarkable books." Includes an illuminating afterword by Joyce Carol Oates.

Book Description

A collection of literature anthologies and reference books for Key Stage 3 onwards.

Edition details

• Publisher: Broadview Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1554811031
• ISBN 13: 9781554811038
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 358
• Editor: MacDonald D.L., Scherf Kathleen