Transmedia Creatures: Frankenstein’s Afterlives
Edited by Francesca Saggini, Anna Enrichetta Soccio.
https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/transmedia-creatures/9781684480616
Contributions by Lidia De Michelis, Eleanor Beal, Gino Roncaglia, Claire Nally, Claudia Gualtieri, Federico Meschini, Enrico Reggiani, Diego Saglia, Daniele Pio Buenza, Ruth Heholt, Andrew McInnes, Janet Larson
296 pages, 6, 6 x 9
Paperback,October 19, 2018,$29.95
978-1-6844-8060-9
[other formats also available]
About This Book
On the 200th anniversary of the first edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Transmedia Creatures presents studies of Frankenstein by international scholars from converging disciplines such as humanities, musicology, film studies, television studies, English and digital humanities. These innovative contributions investigate the afterlives of a novel taught in a disparate array of courses - Frankenstein disturbs and transcends boundaries, be they political, ethical, theological, aesthetic, and not least of media, ensuring its vibrant presence in contemporary popular culture. Transmedia Creatures highlights how cultural content is redistributed through multiple media, forms and modes of production (including user-generated ones from “below”) that often appear synchronously and dismantle and renew established readings of the text, while at the same time incorporating and revitalizing aspects that have always been central to it. The authors engage with concepts, value systems and aesthetic-moral categories—among them the family, horror, monstrosity, diversity, education, risk, technology, the body—from a variety of contemporary approaches and highly original perspectives, which yields new connections. Ultimately, Frankenstein, as evidenced by this collection, is paradoxically enriched by the heteroglossia of preconceptions, misreadings, and overreadings that attend it, and that reveal the complex interweaving of perceptions and responses it generates.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Table of Contents
Abbreviations ix
Introduction: Frankenstein: Presence, Process, Progress
Francesca Saggini
PA R T I
Labs, Bots, and Punks: Transmediating Technology and Science
1 Frankenstein and Science Fiction
Gino Roncaglia
2 Monstrous Algorithms and the Web of Fear: Risk, Crisis, and Spectral Finance in Robert Harris’s The Fear Index
Lidia De Michelis
3 Frankensteinian Gods, Fembots, and the New Technological Frontier in Alex Garland’s Ex_Machina
Eleanor Beal
PA R T I I
Becoming Monsters: The Limits of the Human
4 Staging Steampunk Aesthetics in Frankenstein Adaptations: Mechanization, Disability, and the Body
Claire Nally
5 Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus in the Postcolony
Claudia Gualtieri
6 Four- Color Myth: Frankenstein in the Comics
Federico Meschini
PA RT I I I
The Evolution Games of Sight and Sound
7 “Uncouth and inarticulate sounds”: Musico- Literary Traces in Frankenstein, and Frankenstein in Art Music
Enrico Reggiani
8 Enter Monsieur le Monstre: Cultural Border- Crossing and Frankenstein in London and Paris in 1826
Diego Saglia
9 The Theme of the Doppelgänger in James Searle Dawley’s Frankenstein
Daniele Pio Buenza
10 Perverting the Family: Re- Working Victor Frankenstein’s Gothic Blood- Ties in Penny Dreadful
Ruth Heholt
PA R T I V
Monster Reflections
11 The Masked Performer and “the Mane Electric”: The Lives and Multimedia Afterlives of Margaret Atwood’s Doctor Frankenstein
Janet Larson
12 Young Adult Frankenstein
Andrew McInnes
13 Revivifying Frankenstein’s Myth: Historical Encounters and Dialogism in Back from the Dead:
The True Sequel to Frankenstein
Anna Enrichetta Soccio
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
About the Contributors
About the Author/Editor
FRANCESCA SAGGINI is a professor of English literature at the Università della Tuscia in Viterbo, Italy. She is the author of many books, including The Gothic Novel and the Stage: Romantic Appropriations.
ANNA E. SOCCIO is a professor of English literature at the Università G. d’Annunzio in Chieti, Italy. She is the author of several books, including Come leggere “Hard Times”.
