EDITORIAL NOTES

About This Edition

Abstract

This edition of Frankenstein, in gestation for over fifteen years, provides the texts of both the 1818 and 1831 editions, as well as copius annotations that emphasize the novel's strong inter- and intra-textual connections.

About the Editor

Stuart Curran, Vartan Gregorian Professor at the University of Pennsylvania (emeritus as of July 2009), is an active participant in the ongoing Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, under publication by the Johns Hopkins University Press. He has had a long career as a Romanticist, specializing in the Shelleys and in women writers of the period.

Navigation

Every page of this electronic edition of Frankenstein has a table of contents attached. It comes in the form of an expandable menu, at the right hand top side of each page. If you click on the TABLE OF CONTENTS link, the menu will open and expand down the page. With each sub-menu link that you click, the menu expands further. To contract, or collapse the menu, or sub-menus, you click on the same links that you clicked on to open the menu or sub-menus.

For instance, if you opened the TABLE OF CONTENTS menu, then the NOVEL TEXTS sub-menu, then 1818 TEXT, then VOL. I, you can close each sub-menu in reverse order.

Another option would be to close the whole expandable menu by clicking on the TABLE OF CONTENTS. This will leave the sub-menus open, so when you click on TABLE OF CONTENTS again, you will not have to re-open the sub-menus.

A final option would be to return the entire expandable menu to its default state by refreshing the browser.

If you decide you would like to, say, look briefly at different sections of the site, you might find it helpful to expand the menu on one page, follow links from that expanded menu to different pages, and then when you are done, hit the back button of the browser to return to the original page with the menu expanded. Otherwise you will need to expand the menu on every page you open.

There are other navigational options at the bottom of each page of the edition. If the page you are reading is part of a larger group (say a chapter in a volume), typically there are links at the bottom that will take you to the previous and following pages in the series.

There is also a "bread crumb" trail that provides links to other parts of the edition. Finally, if you would like to travel to other sections of Romantic Circles, there is a footer menu for that.

Pop-up Notes

This edition has pop-up notes that are accessed through links in the text. Often the notes contain links to other sections of the edition. When you click on one of these links within the pop-up note, a third window will open.

To return to the main page you were reading, you can close the pop-up boxes, or you can click on the main page you were reading and the pop-up boxes will disappear from view. Please note that these boxes are still open, but are now behind the main page. Eventually you will need to close them.

Encoding

This edition was first designed and marked up in XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS by Joseph Byrne at the University of Maryland. Additional markup assistance was contributed by Lisa Marie Rhody, David Rettenmaier, and Mike Quilligan. Finally, in 2009, David, Mike, and Laura Mandell TEI-encoded the edition for the sake of preserving it and making it accessible through NINES. The present design features a detail from Tabulae sceleti et musculorum corporis humani (1747) by Bernhard Siegfried Albinus and engraved by Jan Wandelaar.