Frankenstein (Shelley)

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Description: Frankenstein (Shelley)

Genre: Horror and ghost stories; Literature: Texts; Literature - Classics / Criticism; Fiction; Literature: Classics; Classics; Horror - General; Fiction / Classics;

Average Review: 4 stars

Review: Definitive scholarly edition of the 1818 text: Frankenstein is a great work, though one that has consistently been underrated and misrepresented. Frankenstein is, in the words of Donald H. Reiman, "the most seminal literary work of the Romantic period". It is a work of profound and radical ideas, written in poetically powerful prose. Frankenstein is not really a gothic novel, although its author sometimes employs gothic conventions and language, and even spoofs them. Rather, Frankenstein is an enduring myth, a novel of ideas, and above all, a moral allegory about the evil effects of intolerance and prejudice, ostracism and alienation, both to the victims of intolerance and to society at large. Since there are some fine reviews here, I'll concentrate on this particular edition -- the University of Chicago Press edition, edited by James Rieger. This is one of the two best editions of Frankenstein available (the other being the Norton edition edited by J. Paul Hunter). Most importantly, this is the original 1818 edition, rather than the inferior, bowdlerized 1831 edition -- which is the most common, and the only one that was available for well over a century. James Rieger was the first editor to restore the 1818 text -- Frankenstein as it ought to be read. This is a scholarly text, but it is also very readable. It is apparent, from Rieger's collation of the 1818 and the 1831 texts, that the 1831 changes weakened the work, in terms of both ideas and style. Rieger took much flak from feminists for daring to assert that Percy Bysshe Shelley was a minor collaborator. The appendices include the full text of John William Polidori's story, "The Vampyre; A Tale" and Byron's brief fragment of a vampire story. Rieger's comments on the 1831 Introduction -- written by Mary Shelley and (in my opinion) her father, William Godwin -- are perceptive. Please check out my own book, The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein, which makes the case that Frankenstein was really written by Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of the greatest poets in the English language. I also argue that male love, both idealized and demonized, is a central theme of Frankenstein.