Frankenstein at 200:
A Very Selective Bibliographic & Web Guide

Compiled by Ralph Dumain

On the web

Frankenstein is Coming to Your Neighbourhood!! – Graham Henderson: Home of The Real Percy Bysshe Shelley

Frankenreads

Selected Texts [of Frankenstein]

It’s Alive: ‘Frankenstein’ at 200, The Morgan Library & Museum, October 12, 2018 through January 27, 2019

Mary Shelley’s Annotated Frankenstein

It’s Alive!: A Visual History of Frankenstein, by Elizabeth Campbell Denlinger

Frankenstein at 200 [Morgan Library exhibition review] by Paul A. Cantor, The Weekly Standard, December 13, 2018

Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The Pennsylvania Electronic Edition, edited by Stuart Curran

Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus [review] by Percy Bysshe Shelley

On Frankenstein -Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Frankenstein | Romantic Circles

Frankenstein. The Shelley-Godwin Archive

The Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Chronology & Resource Site | Romantic Circles

Leslie S. Klinger

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein and the Villa Diodati by Greg Buzwell (British Library)

Frankenstein Is Not the Name of the Monster! (feat. Seth Rogen and Will Ferrell) - Drunk History (video)

Key editions of Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851), with supplementary material

The New Annotated Frankenstein by Mary Shelley; edited with a foreword and notes by Leslie S. Klinger; with additional research by Janet Byrne; introduction by Guillermo Del Toro; afterword by Anne K. Mellor. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017. [lxxx], 352 pp. ISBN: 978-0871409492

Introduction: Mary Shelley, or the Modern Galatea, by Guillermo del Toro   xi
Foreword  19
A Note on the Text   lxxiii
FRANKENSTEIN, OR THE MODERN PROMETHEUS   1
Afterword: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Genetic Engineering by Anne K. Mellor  279
Appendix 1: Author’s Introduction [to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein]   291
Appendix 2: A Chronology of the Events of Frankenstein   301
Appendix 3: On “Frankenstein.” By the late Percy Bysshe Shelley   305
Appendix 4: Frankenstein on the Stage and the Screen   309
    [Interview with Mel Brooks, Writer-Director of Young Frankenstein 324]
Appendix 5: Frankenstein in Academia     329
Appendix 6: Frankenstein in Popular Culture   337
Bibliography    343
    [Primary Sources; Biography and Criticism; Stage and Screen; Additional References; Parodies, Pastiches, and Comics]  
Acknowledgments   351

The Annotated Frankenstein, edited by Susan J. Wolfson and Ronald Levao. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012.

Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, Contexts, Criticism, edited by J. Paul Hunter. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012.

Butler, Marilyn. “Frankenstein and Radical Science” (1993), pp. 404-416. Originally published in Times Literary Supplement, 9 April 1993. [Seminal essay.]

Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus: the 1818 Text, edited with introduction and notes by Marilyn Butler. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Note Butler’s “The Shelleys and Radical Science,” pp. xv-xxi.

Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus. London: Colburn and Bentley, 1831.

Humanity 101: The Syllabus of Frankenstein’s Monster (The Public Domain Review).

The Essential Frankenstein: Including the Complete Novel by Mary Shelley, written and edited by Leonard Wolf, illustrations by Christopher Bing. New York: Plume, 1993.

Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds, edited by David H. Guston, Ed Finn, and Jason Scott Robert; managing editors, Joey Eschrich and Mary Drago. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017.

Some key reference and critical works on Frankenstein & Mary Shelley

Bann, Stephen, ed. Frankenstein, Creation and Monstrosity. London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 1994.

Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein, edited by Andrew Smith. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, edited by Esther Schor. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

A Mary Shelley Encyclopedia, by Lucy Morrison and Staci Stone. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003.

Morton, Timothy. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: A Sourcebook. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Glut, Donald F. The Frankenstein Catalog. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1984.

Frayling, Christopher. Frankenstein: the First Two Hundred Years. London: Reel Art Press, an imprint of Rare Art Press Ltd, 2017.

Hitchcock, Susan Tyler. Frankenstein: a Cultural History. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007.

Denlinger, Elizabeth Campbell. It’s Alive!: A Visual History of Frankenstein. New York: The Morgan Library Museum, 2018.

Popular & scholarly historical accounts

Montillo, Roseanne. The Lady and Her Monsters: a Tale of Dissections, Real-life Dr. Frankensteins, and the Creation of Mary Shelley’s Masterpiece. New York: Willam Morrow, 2013.

Perkowitz, Sidney; Mueller, Eddy von; eds. Frankenstein: How a Monster became an Icon, the Science and Enduring Allure of Mary Shelley’s Creation. New York: Pegasus Books, 2018.

Stott, Andrew McConnell. The Poet and the Vampyre: the Curse of Byron and the Birth of Literature’s Greatest Monsters. New York: Pegasus Books, 2014.

Special topics & deep background

Baldick, Chris. In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Deakin, Wayne George. Hegel and the English Romantic Tradition. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

See esp. Part V: The Contingent Limits of Romantic Myth Making — 5.4 Embodied Scepticism: Frankenstein.

Frankenstein in Theory, edited by Orrin N. C. Wan. New York: Bloomsbury, 2020.

Morus, Iwan Rhys. Frankenstein’s Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early-Nineteenth-Century London. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Morus, Iwan Rhys. Shocking Bodies: Life, Death & Electricity in Victorian England. Stroud: The History Press, 2011.

See also: Ada Lovelace, electricity, ideology & Victorian science, reviewed by R. Dumain.

Richardson, Alan. Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780-1832. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Ruston, Sharon. Shelley and Vitality. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Terada, Rei. Metaracial: Hegel, Antiblackness, and Political Identity. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2023. See Chapter 6: Frankenstein and the “Free Black”, pp. 106-129.

Willis, Martin. Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines: Science Fiction and the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2006.

See esp. the chapter: Mary Shelley’s Electric Imagination.

Young, Elizabeth. Black Frankenstein: the Making of an American Metaphor. New York: New York University Press, 2008.

See also: Malchow; Terada; Wan.

Journal articles

Malchow, H. L. “Frankenstein’s Monster and Images of ‘Race’ in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Past and Present 139 (1993): 90-130.

Mitchie, Elsie B. “Production Replaces Creation: Market Forces and Frankenstein as Critique of Romanticism,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 12, no. 1, 1988, pp. 27-33.

Scrivener, Michael. “Frankenstein’s Ghost Story: The Last Jacobin Novel,” Genre, 19, no. 3, Fall 1986, pp. 299-318.

Note: Listed are some key resources, editions, and works of and about Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Frankenstein, and further down the list, a few studies on a few topics of particular interest. The items listed will lead you to a huge further wealth of material. You should read the original 1818 version of the novel first, which, while Percy Bysshe Shelley contributed input, may more faithfully reflect Mary’s authentic and more radical perspective, whereas the altered slant of the 1831 edition may reflect her caving to external pressures.  (RD)

“There Is No God” (1813)
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Dialectic and Dystopia: A Century Before and After the Russian Revolution Through Literature
by Ralph Dumain

Percy Bysshe Shelley Study Guide

Karel Čapek's R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), 1920-2021

Science Fiction & Utopia Research Resources: A Selective Work in Progress

William Blake Study Guide

Audience/Reading Public, Professionalization/Specialization of Writers, Literary Forms,
Division of Labor: Bibliography