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Zusatztext Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is one of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century Gothicism. While stay-ing in the Swiss Alps in 1816 with her lover Percy Shelley! Lord Byron! and others! Mary! then eighteen! began to concoct the story of Dr. Victor Frankenstein and the monster he brings to life by electricity. Written in a time of great personal tragedy! it is a subversive and morbid story warning against the dehumanization of art and the corrupting influence of science. Packed with allusions and literary references! it is also one of the best thrillers ever written. Frankenstein; Or! the Modern Prometheus was an instant bestseller on publication in 1818. The prototype of the science fiction novel! it has spawned countless imitations and adaptations but retains its original power. This Modern Library edition includes a new Introduction by Wendy Steiner! the chair of the English department at the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Scandal of Pleasure. Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in 1797 in London. She eloped to France with Shelley! whom she married in 1816. After Frankenstein! she wrote several novels! including Valperga and Falkner! and edited editions of the poetry of Shelley! who had died in 1822. Mary Shelley died in London in 1851. Informationen zum Autor Mary Shelley Klappentext Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.” A summer evening’s ghost stories, lonely insomnia in a moonlit Alpine room, and a runaway imagination—fired by philosophical discussions with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelly about science, galvanism, and the origins of life—conspired to produce for Mary Shelley this haunting night specter. By morning it had become the germ of her Romantic masterpiece, Frankenstein . Written in 1816, when she was only nineteen, Mary Shelley’s novel of “The Modern Prometheus” chillingly dramatized the dangerous potential of life begotten upon a laboratory table. A frightening creation myth for our own time, Frankenstein remains one of the greatest horror stories ever written and is an undisputed classic of its kind.VOLUME I LETTER 1 To Mrs. Saville, England St. Petersburgh, Dec. 11th, 17-- You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. I arrived here yesterday; and my first task is to assure my dear sister of my welfare, and increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking. I am already far north of London; and as I walk in the streets of Petersburgh, I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves, and fills me with delight. Do you understand this feeling? This breeze, which has travelled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy climes. Inspirited by this wind of promise, my day dreams become more fervent and vivid. I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight. There, Margaret, the sun is for ever visible, its broad disk just skirting the horizon, and diffusing a perpetual splendour. There--for with your leave, my sister, I will put some trust in preceding navigators--there snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe. Its productions and features may be without example, as the phenomena of the heavenly bodies undoubtedly are in those undiscovered solitud...
