Frankenstein: Or "The Modern Prometheus"

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AuthorHouse, 2004 - 316 pàgines

It was on a dreary night in November,

That I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that

almost amounted to agony, I

Collected the instruments of life around me

How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how

Delineate the wretch whom with such infinite

Pains and care I had endeavoured to form?

FRANKENSTEIN or THE MODERN PROMETHEUS by Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley is considered a masterpiece of gothic horror and science fiction. The novel was first published in London in 1818, and it adeptly illustrates, with a resounding magnitude, the ideas and visions of the Romantic Movement as realized by the poets Percy Shelley and George Gordon Lord Byron.

Melding the surreal and the real, the conscious and the subconscious, the nightmare and the dream, Mary Shelley, guided by the literary ambitions of her husband Percy, the philosophical legacy of her father William Godwin and the ghost of her feminist mother Mary Wollstonecraft, gives us Victor Frankenstein, a hero reminiscent of Ahab, in dark pursuit of the hideous progeny which is also his alter-ego, the Monster.

In the end, FRANKENSTEIN is a tale of madness and longing, the bonds of parent and child, friends and lovers. It is one of literature's greatest psychological stories in its ability to capture human insight and desire, and the depths to which that desire might lead us. Mary Shelley's greatest novel is, ultimately, an undisputed classic for all ages.

Sobre l'autor (2004)

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born in England on August 30, 1797. Her parents were two celebrated liberal thinkers, William Godwin, a social philosopher, and Mary Wollstonecraft, a women's rights advocate. Eleven days after Mary's birth, her mother died of puerperal fever. Four motherless years later, Godwin married Mary Jane Clairmont, bringing her and her two children into the same household with Mary and her half-sister, Fanny. Mary's idolization of her father, his detached and rational treatment of their bond, and her step-mother's preference for her own children created a tense and awkward home. Mary's education and free-thinking were encouraged, so it should not surprise us today that at the age of sixteen she ran off with the brilliant, nineteen-year old and unhappily married Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley became her ideal, but their life together was a difficult one. Traumas plagued them: Shelley's wife and Mary's half-sister both committed suicide; Mary and Shelley wed shortly after he was widowed but social disapproval forced them from England; three of their children died in infancy or childhood; and while Shelley was an aristocrat and a genius, he was also moody and had little money. Mary conceived of her magnum opus, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, when she was only nineteen when Lord Byron suggested they tell ghost stories at a house party. The resulting book took over two years to write and can be seen as the brilliant creation of a powerful but tormented mind. The story of Frankenstein has endured nearly two centuries and countless variations because of its timeless exploration of the tension between our quest for knowledge and our thirst for good. Shelley drowned when Mary was only 24, leaving her with an infant and debts. She died from a brain tumor on February 1, 1851 at the age of 54.

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