Frankenstein (Norton Critical Editions)

Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours


Lenny's description:


Seller's description:
The text of this Norton Critical Edition is that of the 1818 first edition, published in three volumes by Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, and Jones, in which only obvious typographical errors have been corrected. This text represents what Frankenstein's first readers encountered and is the text favored by scholars. A special critical section, Composition and Revision, includes essays by M. K. Joseph and Anne Mellor that address the issues surrounding teachers' choice of text. Contemporary perspectives of the text are provided in two sections: Contexts helps place the novel in relation to the mind of its creator through writings by Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John William Polidori; Nineteenth-Century Responses collects six reactions to the book from the years 1818 to 1886. Criticism brings together twelve seminal essays. The emphasis is on range—both critical (psychoanalytic, mythic, new historicist, and feminist essays are included) and chronological (essays span the last thirty years). Christopher Small, George Lebine, Ellen Moers, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Barbara Johnson, Mary Poovey, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, William Veeder, Anne K. Mellor, Susan Winnett, Marilyn Butler, and Lawrence Lipking provide diverse perspectives. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included. .


Product details:

Item number (ASIN): 0393964582
Author: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Creator: J. Paul Hunter, Editor
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.7
ISBN: 0393964582
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 352
Package Dimensions: 79 x 504 x 827 (hundredths-inches)
Publication Date: December 17, 1995
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Binding: Paperback

---

There are no visitor reviews available at this time.

Add your own review!

---

Rating: - Frankenstein
Came in a timely manner. Was exactly as described and was exactly what I needed.

---

Rating: - A classic in tragic horror
I have a fetish for classic novels and have read just about everything from Pride and Prejudice to The Three Musketeers to Brom Stoker's Dracula, so naturally when I found a copy of Frankenstein at Barnes and Noble I bought it and was not disapointed. Written in that wonderfully poetic and intelectual style of the old masters of liturature it is a tale of Ambition, forbidden practices, horror, madness, anguish, and retribution. If you are the kind of person who expects a classic horror film type story full of gore and violence then you will be in for a disapointment. The real focus of the story is within the mind of good Doctor Frankenstien himself (who was actually quite young) and the monster he created. Also, if you only like happy endings, this book is not for you. If not, this is a great book only dampened by the fact that it is not longer. Fans of Dracula will love this story and thank God for the 'Little Ice Age' that brought this book into being.

---

Rating: - Once Underestimated, Now Overestimated?
It is a classic and, therefore, deserves a close reading. Norton editions are great. The text size is good, the print tends to be first-rate, and the critical essays usually include classic essays and major critics. This doesn't strike me as being worthy of the "A" list of literature, but that is a prejudice. I can't really accept any genre lit on the list, including detective, gothic, or science fiction. It is an interesting sample of this period, but I didn't get a lot out the the book itself. For one thing, the atmosphere of doom and gloom doesn't work for me. Everyone is sick and morbidly depressed and sad. This is not explained and I don't think one can easily guess. The writing works, sure, but I don't find the prose style uplifting or thrilling, as writing. The story is very familiar. As a child of the 60s, I remember well watching reruns of the classic film on TV. It is hard to divorce the brilliant film from the wordy novel. The film has some brilliant set-pieces. The novel has a lot in it and it certainly can and should be read at multiple levels, but in the end it is Victorian intellectual thought of the low order. There are other, better thinkers and novelists of far greater talent.

---

Rating: - The hobo Philosopher
This is a classic and that is the reason that I read it. I liked the movie but the book is a whole other experience. I liked the format; I like the style; I liked the prose; I liked the intellectuality. I really didn't analyze it. I just read it for the fun of it. It was good. It was fun. Books written by Richard Noble - The Hobo Philosopher: "Hobo-ing America: A Workingman's Tour of the U.S.A.." "A Summer with Charlie" "A Little Something: Poetry and Prose" "Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother" "The Eastpointer" Selections from award winning column.

---

Rating: - One of two best editions -- 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 good reviews here, I'll concentrate on this particular edition -- the Norton Critical Edition, edited by J. Paul Hunter. This is one of the two best editions of Frankenstein available (the other being the Chicago edition edited by James Rieger). 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. Hunter's introduction is not bad. Some of the reviews and essays in the back are good, and some are not, but this is par for the course. The main text is intelligently annotated. 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.

---

Similar items suggested by Amazon:

Three Case Histories

The Selected Political Writings of John Locke (Norton Critical Editions)

The Origin of Species, Revised Edition (Abridged)

The Social Contract (Penguin Classics)

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Norton Critical Editions)