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An exploration of the treatment of Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein in popular art and culture, this book examines adaptations in film, comics, theatre, art, video-games and more, to illuminate how the novel's myth has evolved in the two centuries since its publication. Divided into four sections,
The Afterlives of Frankenstein considers the cultural dialogues Mary Shelley's novel has engaged with in specific historical moments; the extraordinary examples of how
Frankenstein has suffused our cultural consciousness; and how the
Frankenstein myth has become something to play with, a locus for reinvention and imaginative interpretation. In the final part, artists respond to the
Frankenstein legacy today, reintroducing it into cultural circulation in ways that speak creatively to current anxieties and concerns.
Bringing together popular interventions that riff off Shelley's major themes, chapters survey such works as
Frankenstein in Baghdad, Bob Dylan's recent "My Own Version of You", the graphic novel series
Destroyer with its Black cast of characters, Jane Louden's
The Mummy!, the first Japanese translation of Frankenstein, "The New Creator", the iconic
Frankenstein mask and Kenneth Brannagh's
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein film. A deep-dive into the crevasses of
Frankenstein adaptation and lore, this volume offers compelling new directions for scholarship surrounding the novel through dynamic critical and creative responses to Shelley's original.
List of contents
Introduction
Robert I. Lublin and Elizabeth A. Fay Part 1: Cultural Reinventions1. "Only from the future":
Frankenstein,
The Mummy!, and the Ontology of Revolution, David Baulch (University of West Florida, USA)
2. Frankens-Time:
Frankenstein and the Temporal Origins of Artificial Intelligence, Tobias Wilson-Bates (Georgia Gwinnett College)
3. Meiji Japan Responds to
Frankenstein: The 1889-90 translation "The New Creator", Tomoko Nakagawa (University of the Sacred Heart, Japan)
4.
Frankenstein Goes Global: Returning the Necropolitical Gaze with
Frankenstein in Baghdad, Hugh Charles O'Connell (University of Massachusetts Boston, USA)
Part 2: Frankensteinia5. Frankenstein in the Popular Imagination, Sidney E. Berger (Simmons College, USA)
6. Frankenstein Mask: Perpetuating the Monster Assemblage, Taylor Hagood (Florida Atlantic University, USA)
7. Victor LaValle and Dietrich Smith's Graphic Novel
Destroyer (2020), Andrew Shepherd (University of Utah, USA)
Part 3: Playing Frankenstein8. Staging Mary Shelley in Contemporary
Frankenstein Biodramas, Brittany Reid (Brock University, Canada)
9. The Evolving Myth of Frankenstein in Twenty-First-Century Film, Robert I. Lublin (University of Massachusetts Boston, USA)
10. The Water and the Corpse: Exploring Nature, Shelley's Echoes, and Twenty-First Century Cultural Anxieties in
The Frankenstein Chronicles, Lorna Piatti-Farnell (Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand)
11. The Aesthetics of Digital Naturecultures in La Belle Games's
The Wanderer: Frankenstein's Creature (2019), Andrew Burkett (Union College, USA)
Part 4: Artists Talk Back12.
A Monstrous Circus on Frankenstein
: Mediating Shelley's Novel through John Cage's Multimedia Strategies, Miriam Wallace and R. L. Silver (New College of Florida, USA)
13. Frankenstein in Three Chords, Elizabeth A. Fay (University of Massachusetts Boston, USA) and James McGirr (Independent Scholar, USA)
14. From
Frankenstein to Writing SciFi to Collage, Kate Hart (University of Massachusetts Boston, USA)
About the author
Robert Lublin is Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Massachusetts Boston, USA. He is author of Costuming the Shakespearean Stage: Visual Codes of Representation in Early Modern Theatre and Culture (2016) and contributing co-editor of Reinventing the Renaissance: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries in Adaptation and Performance (2013). Among his published essays, he has co-authored two book chapters on Frankenstein.Elizabeth A. Fay is Professor of English in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Massachusetts Boston, USA. She has published six books on British Romantic literature, including Romantic Egypt: Abyssal Ground of British Romanticism (2021), Fashioning Faces: The Portraitive Mode in British Romanticism (2010), and Romantic Medievalism: History and the Romantic Literary Ideal (2001). Her articles and books include discussions of a range of Mary Shelley’s works.
ELIZABETH A. FAY is Assistant Professor of English, University of Massachusetts at Boston. She is co-editor of Working-Class Women in Academia: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory (1993) and a contributor to Constructing and Reconstructing Gender: The Links among Communication, Language, and Gender (1992).
