Frankenstein - Shelley, Mary

Résumé :
Frankenstein is the most celebrated horror story ever written. It tells the dreadful tale of Victor Frankenstein, a visionary young student of natural philosophy, who discovers the secret of life. In the grip of his obsession he constructs a being from dead body parts, and animates this creature. The results, for Victor and for his family, are catastrophic. Written when Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was just 19, Frankenstein was inspired by the ghost stories and vogue for Gothic literature that fascinated the Romantic writers of her time. She transformed these supernatural elements into an epic parable that warned against the threats to humanity posed by accelerating technological progress. This edition, based on the original 1818 text, explains in detail the turbulent intellectual context in which Shelley was writing, and also investigates how her novel has since become a byword for controversial practices in science and medicine, from manipulating ecosystems to vivisection and genetic modification. As an iconic study of power, creativity, and, ultimately, what it is to be human, Frankenstein continues to shape our thinking in profound ways to this day. This edition includes : introduction, textual note, bibliography, chronology, appendices, explanatory notes.

Biographie:
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born in London in 1797, sole child of William Godwin, author of Political justice and Caleb Williams, and Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman . her mother died a few days after her birth. She met the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1812 and eloped to the Continent with him in July 1814. They spent the summer of 1816 with Lord Byron near Geneva, and it was there that Frankenstein was begun. They married in London at the end of the year following the suicide of Percy Shelley's first wife, and Frankenstein was completed a few months later and published in 1818. The Shelleys returned to the Continent . however, their two infant children died on these travels and Percy Shelley was drowned in Italy in 1822. Shelley returned to England where she continued to write, and where she raised their remaining son. She published another five novels - Valperga (1823), The Last Man (1826), Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837) - as well as many short stories, reviews, and biographical essays, and editing the works of her husband (1839). She resumed her travels in the 184os, and when her father-in-law died in 1844 her son Florence inherited the Shelley title and she shared in the estate, leaving her financially secure. Mary Shelley died in 1851 and is buried in Bournemouth. Nick Groom is Professor in English at the University of Exeter, and a founding member of the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. He has published widely for both academic and popular readerships, and among his many books are The Forger's Shadow (2002), The Union jack (2006, rev. edn 2017), The Gothic : A Very Short Introduction (2012), The Seasons : A Celebration of the English Year (2014), The Vampire : A New History (2018), and editions of a variety of eighteenth-century texts, from crime writing to Shakespeare. He has edited Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (2014), Matthew Lewis's The Monk (2016), and Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (2017) for Oxford World's Classics.

Sommaire:
Introduction; Note on the Text; Select Bibliography; A Chronology of Mary Shelley; Frankenstein; Appendix A. Author's Introduction to the Standard Novels Edition (1831); Appendix B. The Third Edition (1831): Substantive Changes; Appendix C. On Frankenstein by Percy Bysshe Shelley; Explanatory Notes