Frankenstein Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel written by Mary Shelley. Shelley started writing the story when she was eighteen, and the novel was published when she was twenty-one. The first edition was published anonymously in London in 1818. Shelley's name appears on the second edition, published in France. It is common to refer to the monster itself as "Frankenstein", but in the novel the monster is identified via words such as "monster", "fiend", "wretch", "vile insect", "daemon", and "it"; Shelley herself called it "Adam".
Through research one can determine the many influences the author was under during the creation of the novel. She had traveled the region in which the story takes place, and the topics of galvanism and other similar occult ideas were themes of conversation among her companions. The actual storyline took place from a dream. Mary Shelley was talking with her three other writers and they decided they would have a competition to see who could write the best horror story. After thinking for weeks about what her possible storyline could be Shelley dreamed about a scientist who created life and was horrified by what he created. Then "Frankenstein" was written. Frankenstein is infused with some elements of the Gothic novel and the Romantic movement and is also considered to be one of the earliest examples of science fiction.Author: Mary Shelley Download "Frankenstein" from Google Books Frankenstein. Frankenstein, loved by many decades of readers and praised by such eminent literary critics as Harold Bloom, seems hardly to need a recommendation. If you haven't read it recently, though, you may not remember the sweeping force of the prose, the grotesque, surreal imagery, and the multilayered doppelgänger themes of Mary Shelley's masterpiece. As fantasy writer Jane Yolen writes of this (the reviewer's favorite) edition, "The strong black and whites of the main text [illustrations] are dark and brooding, with unremitting shadows and stark contrasts. But the central conversation with the monster who owes nothing to the overused movie image … but is rather the novel's charnel-house composite is where [Barry] Moser's illustrations show their greatest power ... The viewer can all but smell the powerful stench of the monster's breath as its words spill out across the page. Strong book-making for one of the world's strongest and most remarkable books." Includes an illuminating afterword by Joyce Carol Oates.
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