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This edited collection is the first book-length critical study of the Showtime-Sky Atlantic television series Penny Dreadful (2014-2016), which also includes an analysis of Showtime's 2020 spin-off City of Angels. Chapters examine the status of the series as a work of twenty-first-century cable television, contemporary Gothic-horror, and intermedial adaptation, spanning sources as diverse as eighteenth and nineteenth-century British fiction and poetry, American dime novels, theatrical performance, Hollywood movies, and fan practices. Featuring iconic monsters such as Dr. Frankenstein and his Creature, the "bride" of Frankenstein, Dracula, the werewolf, Dorian Gray, and Dr. Jekyll, Penny Dreadful is a mash-up of familiar texts and new Gothic figures such as spiritualist Vanessa Ives, played by the magnetic Eva Green. As a recent example of adapting multiple sources in different media, Penny Dreadful has as much to say about the Romantic and Victorian eras as it does about our present-day fascination with screen monsters.
Hear the authors talk about the collection here: https://nrftsjournal.org/monsters-all-are-we-not-an-interview-with-julie-grossman-and-will-scheibel/
List of contents
1. Introduction.- 2. The Medium Is the Model.- 3. The Adaptive Marketing of Penny Dreadful: Listening to the Dreadfuls.- 4. Penny Dreadful and Frankensteinian Collection: Museums, Anthologies, and Other Monstrous Media from Shelley to Showtime.- 5. In the House of the Night Creatures: Penny Dreadful's Dracula.- 6. Vampirism, Blood, and Memory in Penny Dreadful and Only Lovers Left Alive.- 7. 'The Dead Place': Cosmopolitan Gothic in Penny Dreadful's London.- 8. Adapting the Universal Classic Monsters in Penny Dreadful: An Uncanny Resurrection.- 9. Penny Dreadful and the Stage: Lessons in Horror and Heritage.- 10. Ethan Chandler, Penny Dreadful, and the Dime Novel; or, Dancing with American Werewolves in London.- 11. Dreadful Noir, Adaptation, and City of Angels: 'Monsters, All, Are We Not?'.- 12. Penny Dreadful's Palimpsestuous Bride of Frankenstein.- 13. Predators Far and Near: The Sadean Gothic in Penny Dreadful.- 14. 'All Those Sacred Midnight Things': Queer Authorship, Veiled Desire, and Divine Transgression in Penny Dreadful.- 15. Borderland Identities in Penny Dreadful: City of Angels: Urban Planning and Its Impact on Chicano Communities.
About the author
Julie Grossman is a professor of English and Communication and Film Studies at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, NY, USA. Her monographs include
Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny (2015),
Ida Lupino, Director (with Therese Grisham, 2017),
Twin Peaks (with Will Scheibel, 2020), and
The Femme Fatale (2020). She is co-editor (with R. Barton Palmer) of the essay collection
Adaptation in Visual Culture (2017) and (with Marc C. Conner and R. Barton Palmer)
Screening Contemporary Irish Fiction and Drama (2022).
Will Scheibel is an associate professor of English at Syracuse University, USA, where he teaches film and screen studies. He is the author of
Gene Tierney: Star of Hollywood's Home Front (2022) and, with Julie Grossman, co-author of
Twin Peaks (2020).
