Frankenstein Retold: Literary Adaptation in Contemporary Fiction
Daniel Cook (Author)
Full details and ordering information at https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/frankenstein-retold-9781350501959/.
Product details
Published Apr 16 2026
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Extent 240
ISBN 9781350501959
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Dimensions 9 x 6 inches
Series Gothic Legacies
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
Description
Placing Frankenstein in the critical frameworks of book history and secondary authorship, this book explores the increasing array of book-based reworkings of, and sequels to, the novel that up to this point, have been largely ignored. Covering novels, novellas and short stories across a range of genres from romance to YA fiction, Frankenstein Retold examines a broad range of these texts in different purviews and demonstrates their own critical value as well and pertinence for understanding new approaches to literary adaptation in theory and practice more broadly. Organised thematically, the book cover topics including: filial characterisation; continuations and sequels explicitly tied to Shelley's narrative; epistolary, journal-based, found-text and other storytelling forms; coquels set against the original material; fiction in which Shelley's materials have been transplanted to entirely new settings, periods or genres; cameos; and the ghostly presence of the original author. A testament to the vitality of the original story more than two centuries after it first appeared, Daniel Cook explores works from a huge range of writers such as Peter Ackroyd, Jeanette Winterson, Ahmed Saadawi, Suzanne Weyne, Jon Skovron, William A. Chandler, Susan Heyboer Okeefe, Hailey Bailey, Laurie Sheck, Edward M. Erdelac, Fred Saberhagen and Kate Horsley among many others. With a large body of scholarship already exploring the rich cinematic, transmedial and cultural afterlife of Shelley's novel, Frankenstein Retold offers a bridge between literary studies notions of book history and authorship, and media studies approaches to transmedia storytelling, between fan writing and media production histories.
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
New and Hybrid Species
Retelling Tales in Theory and Practice Frankensteinian Retellings Frankenstein Retold: A User's Guide
Chapter 1. New Beginnings
The Answering Novel: Frankenstein Unbound
The Teller and the Tale: Frankissstein
Chapter 2. The Literary Redo
The Strange Casebook
The Turning Pages: A Monster's Notes
When a Monster Calls: Monster and The Frankenstein Papers
Chapter 3. Sequels and Prequels
The Frankenstein Sequel Becoming Victor
Chapter 4. Brides Revisited
Half-Finished Brides
Survivors: Pandora's Bride and Born of the Sea
Chapter 5. Orcadian Coquels
The Bride-to-be: The Monster's Wife
The Restless Bride of Eynhallow
Chapter 6. Patchwork Things
The Twice-Told Tale: Poor Things
M/S: Patchwork Girl
Chapter 7. Old Endings
The Under-Story of Elizabeth Frankenstein Unnatural Women
Frankenstein's Daughters
Afterword: The Modern Deucalion
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Daniel Cook is Associate Dean and Reader in English Literature at the University of Dundee, UK. He is the author of Walter Scott and Short Fiction (2021), Reading Swift’s Poetry (2020), and Thomas Chatterton and Neglected Genius, 1760-1830 (2013). His most recent books include The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver's Travels, with Nicholas Seager (2023), Gulliver’s Travels: The Norton Library (2023), Scottish Poetry, 1730-1830 (2023), and Austen After 200: New Reading Spaces, with Annika Bautz and Kerry Sinanan (2022).
