Further Reading and Viewing

Frankenstein

Study Guide — Further Reading and Viewing

The Last Man — Mary Shelley, 1826. A post-apocalyptic novel set in a plague-ravaged twenty-first century that shares Frankenstein's preoccupations with isolation, the limits of human ambition, and the grief of surviving those one loves.
Mathilda — Mary Shelley, written 1819, published 1959. A short, intense novella exploring guilt, grief, and a daughter's relationship with a tormented father; it illuminates the emotional world Shelley was inhabiting immediately after Frankenstein.

Paradise Lost — John Milton, 1667. The epic poem the creature reads in Chapter 15 of the novel; its portrait of Satan as a being of great intelligence cast out by his creator is the direct template for the creature's self-understanding and his anguished relationship with Victor.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner — Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798. Invoked explicitly in Walton's second letter, the poem's themes of transgression, isolation, and the compulsion to confess a terrible act run through the novel's entire frame narrative.
Emile, or On Education — Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762. Rousseau's argument that human beings are naturally good but corrupted by society underlies the creature's development; the creature's narrative in Chapters 11–16 can be read as a dark experiment in Rousseauvian natural education.
The Sorrows of Young Werther — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774. One of the three books the creature discovers and reads; its themes of romantic suffering and social exclusion directly shape how the creature understands his own misery.

Shelley and His Circle — various scholars, Harvard University Press, ongoing from 1961. The standard scholarly edition of the manuscripts of the Shelley circle; students seeking the biographical context of the novel's composition will find it indispensable.
The Endurance of Frankenstein — edited by George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher, 1979. A landmark collection of critical essays covering the novel's literary sources, its feminist dimensions, and its cultural afterlife, written accessibly enough for strong secondary students.

Frankenstein — directed by James Whale, 1931. The Universal Pictures film starring Boris Karloff; though it departs significantly from the novel, it established the visual iconography of the creature that all subsequent adaptations and critical discussions must reckon with.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein — directed by Kenneth Branagh, 1994. A more faithful adaptation that restores the frame narrative and the creature's eloquence, making it a useful companion for classroom discussion of what the novel gains that film struggles to convey.
Frankenstein — National Theatre production, directed by Danny Boyle, 2011. Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller alternated the roles of Victor and the creature, a casting decision that brilliantly dramatises the novel's argument that creator and creation mirror each other.