Frankenstein (Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism) [Hardcover]

Mary Shelley (Author), Johanna M. Smith (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0312227620 | ISBN-13: 978-0312227623 | Publication Date: May 19, 2000 | Edition: 2nd

This revision of a widely adopted critical edition presents the 1831 text of Mary Shelley's English Romantic novel along with critical essays that introduce students to Frankenstein from contemporary psychoanalytic, Marxist, feminist, gender, and cultural studies perspectives. An additional essay demonstrates how various critical perspectives can be combined. In this second edition, three of the six essays are new.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Mary Shelley is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Arlington. Johanna M., ed. Smith

Product Details

• Hardcover: 484 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; 2nd edition (May 19, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312227620
• ISBN-13: 978-0312227623
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,506,946 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the first great work of science fiction, June 11, 2001

By 

Robert J. Crawford (Balmette Talloires, France) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Frankenstein (Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism) (Paperback)

After seeing at least five versions of this tale in film - one of my great childhood monster loves - I was happy to finally read the novel. As so often occurs with classics, I was as surprised as I was fascinated.

For starters, the characters are far more subtle than any of the film versions: Victor F appears as a brooding and obsessed genius, but also as a great lover of life and nature. The monster, who is an articulate and literate creature who read Goethe, is even more interesting, from his hopeful beginning to his bitter reaction at rejection and his thirst for vengence. His eloquence was vivid and his pain horribly realistic.

But the work is also fascinating as a window into the mind of the Romantics, who at once strove to reject the rationalism of the Enlightenment yet reflected it. The creature starts off empty and what it becomes is due entirely to his experience. Knowledge is not always good, etc.

Finally, the themes are timeless and full of conflict: creativity giving birth to unimaginable destruction, tampering with nature as its necessities overwhelm even genius, and the like. THe book is a kaleidescope of philosophical reflection. The pain of the creator and the monster alike are inescapably linked like father and son.

I did find the style of the book a bit difficult. It is full of florid rhetoric and lengthy circumlocutions, as the doctor and then the monster tell their stories in almost identical prose.

Highly recommended.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Essays not effective for undergraduates, June 3, 2009

By 

A. Strombeck "boshu" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Frankenstein (Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism) (Paperback)

To start, let me say that I'm an admirer of this series, and have found other books in the series extremely useful (Turn of the Screw, House of Mirth). Having taught the Frankenstein edition this quarter, though, I find myself disappointed in the selection of essays, most of which seem to date from an unfortunate moment in the history of critical theory, a time when critics tended to ape the style of their masters (Lacan and Derrida in particular), letting short bursts of dense ideas substitute for sustained explication. I say "unfortunate" because while such density has its place (more, to my mind, in Lacan or Derrida themselves, who have a linguistic and theoretical purpose for their density), it is off-putting in a volume that purports to be an introduction to critical theory implicitly for undergraduates. Ironically or not, Smith's own contribution is by far the clearest of the bunch, with the psychoanalytic contribution appearing nearly unreadable to most undergraduates and many graduate students (thanks to an intense, and to my eyes rare, focus on Lacan's Imaginary Order). I will not teach this volume again.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Frankenstein, a true classic!, February 12, 2002

By 

Anthony Liberati (NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Frankenstein (Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism) (Paperback)

You don't know Frankenstein until you've read the novel. Forget everything you remember about the classic horror movie of Frankenstein, sure it's great cinema, but the movie just doesn't do it justice like the novel does. The novel has every quality of a perfect story, and Mary Shelley paints a picture with her writing that's far more disturbing and exciting than the movie ever was. What's really great about the book is that the creature speaks and is literate. Throughout the novel, the creature does speaks about the cruelty of man and I actually had sympathy for him as he told his accounts of misfortune. One thing I particularly liked is the way the creature was almost invincible, it really added to the horror that his creator feels as he's chasing him through the bitter cold. The novel is not difficult reading at all and has a decent steady pace to it. There is more than meets the eye to the novel as well. One could look at Shelly's work through a psychoanalytical standpoint and see the novel on an entirely different level than just what's on the surface. Psychoanalyzing the novel brings with it some interesting discussions; for instance, is the creature really just a duplicate of its creator? Read the book and form your own analysis, you won't be disappointed.