The Endurance of Frankenstein Essays on Mary Shelley's Novel [#999964]

Free Download The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley's Novel edited by U. C. Knoepflmacher, George L. Levine
English | May 19, 1982 | ISBN: 0520046404 | True EPUB | 364 pages | 11.7 MB
MARY SHELLEY's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus grew out of a parlor game and a nightmare vision. The story of the book's origin is a famous one, first told in the introduction Mary Shelley wrote for the 1831 edition of the novel. The two Shelleys, Byron, Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, and John William Polidori (Byron's physician) spent a "wet, ungenial summer in the Swiss Alps." Byron suggested that "each write a ghost story." If one is to trust Mary Shelley's account (and James Rieger has shown the untrustworthiness of its chronology and particulars), only she and "poor Polidori" took the contest seriously. The two "illustrious poets," according to her, "annoyed by the platitude of prose, speedily relinquished their uncongenial task." Polidori, too, is made to seem careless, unable to handle his story of a "skull-headed lady." Though Mary Shelley is just as deprecating when she speaks of her own "tiresome unlucky ghost story," she also suggests that its sources went deeper. Her truant muse became active as soon as she fastened on the "idea" of "making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream": "'I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others."