Man As God: 'Frankenstein' Turns 200

In the 19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay Nature: "A man is a god in ruins."

Ever since people contemplated the existence of a divine dimension — and this belief must go back to the very early stages of Homo Sapiens or even earlier — with Neanderthals, a split occurred between the human condition and the eternal.

As humans, it is our curse and our blessing to be aware of our own mortality — and to suffer with the loss of our close ones — and, in a broader sense, with the predicament of others.

In 1818, Mary Shelley published the first edition of Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, a novel that has captured our collective imagination like few others in history. The genesis of the tale is well known, a ghost-story writing competition between Mary, her husband Percy Bysshe, and Lord Byron, during a stormy night on June 1816 on Lake Geneva. There have been more than 300 editions of the novel and at least 90 films, apart from hundreds of comic books and academic books inspired by it.

Two new annotated editions are out: 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, and The New Annotated Frankenstein, edited and with a foreword by Leslie S. Klinger. Both books seek to bring the context of the novel to our times, with references from robotics and genetic engineering to the historical circumstances of the original novel and its subsequent editions.

출처 https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2018/01/10/577025147/man-as-god-frankenstein-turns-200