Neil Fraistat and MITH Produce the Shelley-Godwin Archive
October 30, 2013
Neil Fraistat, professor in the English department and director of MITH, has been hard at work on the Shelley-Godwin Archive.
The Shelley-Godwin Archive was brought into being by MITH along with the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the New York Public Library, and a substantial grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The Archive aims to bring the manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, arguably one of the most renowned literary families, together online for the first time.
Housed at shelleygodwinarchive.org, one of the primary functions of the Archive lets users view transcriptions of manuscripts, and zoom to view details such as insertions and deletions.
The authorship of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has been long debated. The Archives shed light on this by allowing users to view her original notebook pages, as well her husband's revisions.
On Halloween, Neil Fraistat and David Brookshire, also from MITH, will speak at the New York Public Library at 6 pm in the Margaret Berger Forum. They will speak on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein notebooks which were the first transcribed and encoded manuscripts of the Archive. Additionally, the first edition of Frankenstein from 1818, the first illustrated edition from 1831, playbills from early stage productions, and original manuscripts from Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley will be shown specially for this event.
The event is free and open to the public with reservations. Email elizabethdenlinger@nypl.org or call 212-930-0717 for more information.
Check out this article in the New York Times on the Archive!
and this article from The Chronicle of Higher Education: