num_pages: 223
description: The story of Victor Frankenstein and of the monstrous creature he created has held the reading public spellbound since its publication almost a century and a half ago. On the surface, it is a novel of tense and steadily mounting horror; but on a more profound level, it offers searching illumination of the human condition in its portrayal of a scientist who oversteps the bounds of conscience, and of a monster brought to life in an alien world, ever more desperately attempting to escape the torture of his solitude. A brilliant exercise in the macabre, written with near-hallucinatory intensity, Frankenstein represents one of the most striking flowerings of the Romantic imagination. Of its contemporary significance, Harold Bloom writes: “The greatest paradox and most astonishing achievement of Mary Shelley's novel is that the monster is more human than his creator. This nameless being, as much a modern Adam as his creator is a modern Prometheus, is more lovable than his creator and more hateful, more to be pitied and more to be feared, and above all able to give the attentive reader that shock of added consciousness in which aesthetic recognition compels a heightened realization of self.”With an Afterword by Harold Bloom.
language: English
title: Frankenstein
titlecomplete: Frankenstein
characters: Felix, Justine Moritz, Caroline Beaufort Frankenstein, William Frankenstein, Elizabeth Lavenza, Henry Clerval, Safie, Robert Walton, Victor Frankenstein, Ernest Frankenstein, Alphonse Frankenstein, De Lacey, Agatha, The Monster (Frankenstein)
genres: Fiction, Classics, Gothic, Science Fiction, Read For School, Horror, Fantasy, Literature, Novels, School
ratings_count: 1519396
places: Ingolstadt, Switzerland, Germany, Geneva, Arctic Circle
publisher: Signet Classics