Two centuries after its unique ebook, Mary Shelley’s vintage story of gothic horror involves bright existence in "what could be the easiest presentation of the radical" up to now (Guillermo del Toro).

"Remarkably, a nineteen-year-old, writing her first novel, penned a story that mixes tragedy, morality, social remark, and a considerate exam of the very nature of knowledge," writes best-selling writer Leslie S. Klinger in his foreword to The New Annotated Frankenstein. regardless of its indisputable prestige as the most influential works of fiction ever written, Mary Shelley’s novel is usually reductively brushed off because the wellspring for cheesy monster movies or as a cautionary story approximately experimental technology long gone haywire. Now, centuries after the 1st e-book of Frankenstein, Klinger revives Shelley’s gothic masterpiece by means of reproducing her unique textual content with the main lavishly illustrated and comprehensively annotated variation to date.

Featuring over two hundred illustrations and approximately 1,000 annotations, this luxurious quantity recaptures Shelley’s early nineteenth-century global with old precision and resourceful breadth, tracing the social and political roots of the author’s innovative model of Romanticism. Braiding jointly a long time of scholarship together with his personal willing insights, Klinger recounts Frankenstein’s indelible contributions to the geographical regions of technological know-how fiction, feminist conception, and sleek highbrow history—not to say movie background and pop culture. the results of Klinger’s exhaustive examine is a multifaceted portrait of 1 of Western literature’s such a lot divinely talented prodigies, a tender novelist who defied her era’s regulations on woman pursuits via independently helping herself and her teenagers as a author and editor.

Born in an international of guys in the middle of a political and an rising business revolution, Shelley crafted a horror tale that, past its incisive remark on her personal milieu, is well known because the first paintings of technological know-how fiction. The daughter of a pioneering feminist and an Enlightenment thinker, Shelley lived and wrote on the heart of British Romanticism, the “exuberant, younger flow” that rebelled opposed to culture and cause and "with a rebellious scream gave beginning to an international of gods and monsters" (del Toro).

Following his best-selling The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft and The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Klinger not just considers Shelley’s unique 1818 textual content yet, for the 1st time in any annotated quantity, strains the consequences of her major revisions within the 1823 and 1831 variations. With an afterword through popular literary pupil Anne okay. Mellor, The New Annotated Frankenstein celebrates the prescient genius and timeless legacy of the world’s "first really glossy myth."

The New Annotated Frankenstein includes:

• Nearly 1,000 notes that offer info and historic context on each point of Frankenstein and of Mary Shelley’s life
• Over 2 hundred illustrations, together with unique art from the 1831 version and dozens of pictures of real-world destinations that seem within the novel
• Extensive listings of movies and theatrical adaptations
• An creation by means of Guillermo del Toro and an afterword via Anne okay. Mellor