Mary Shelley's Frankenstein / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 241-244) and index.

Introduction / Harold Bloom -- The Monster / Martin Tropp -- Frankenstein's Fallen Angel / Joyce Carol Oates -- Making a Monster / Anne K. Mellor -- Frankenstein's Monster and Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain / H.L. Malchow -- Literate Species: Populations, "Humanities," and Frankenstein / Maureen Noelle McLane -- Facing the Ugly: The Case of Frankenstein / Denise Gigante -- "Passages" in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Toward a Feminist Figure of Humanity? / Cynthia Pon -- Acts of Becoming: Autobiography, Frankenstein, and the Postmodern Body / Mark Mossman -- The Political Geography of Horror in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein / Fred V. Randel -- Frankenstein, Invisibility, and Nameless Dread / Lee Zimmerman.

"In her lifetime, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley was often overshad-owed by the many literary influences with whom she associated, from her own parents to her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley and his friend Lord Byron. However, Mary Shelley's terrifying ghost story, from its inception on a stormy night to its publication in 1817 to its numerous forms on stage and screen, crept into the popular psyche more deeply than anything written by her associates. Shelley's monster illuminated the terrors of childbirth, irresponsible science, technology, and parenting; and her orphaned creature, ugly beyond all imagining, made readers reconsider who the world's monsters really are and how society contributes to creating them. Book jacket."--BOOK JACKET.