Description of the Book: Frankenstein: the original 1818 text (Broadview Literary Texts)
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Mary Shelley's deceptively simple story of Victor Frankenstein and the creature he brings to life, first published in 1818, is now more widely read—and more widely discussed by scholars—than any other work of the Romantic period. In 1831, Shelley published a revised version of the novel, which smoothed over some of the unresolved themes of the story and toned down much of its dark suggestiveness. Increasingly critics argue that the original version—the text used by Macdonald and Scherf—is the better of the two. Until Broadview's first edition, almost all modern editions were based on the 1831 text. Subsequently, a number of the larger presses followed suit. The Broadview text is still widely viewed as the best. It includes an appendix that details the changes made for the later version, excerpts from Milton, Erasmus, Darwin and a range of other contemporary documents that shed a variety of lights on the historical context from which this unique masterpiece emerged. Mary Shelley's novel epitomizes the gothic novel of the 18th-century, and is one of the most translated and published novels in the world. But though Frankenstein has often been placed in the genre of "horror" in modern film and fictional adaptations, it is also a discourse on the "otherness" of femininity, of childhood, of the colonized and the oppressed. Broadview's teaching edition attempts to address these varying themes in Frankenstein, and to aid in the understanding of early feminist and humanist reform movements.
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