Description
Book SynopsisOn 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.
Trade Review"Mary Shelley’s novel has had so many afterlives: the text lives and is constantly reincarnated as an unparalleled text of revision, rewriting, misreading, and overreading in science fiction, film, young adult literature, feminism, biomedical ethics, drama, and many other arenas. On the occasion of the anniversary of the 1818 edition of
Frankenstein, editors Francesca Saggini and Anna Enrichetta Soccio have gathered an admirably wide range of approaches to that vast afterlife. The productive analyses here of these transmedia incarnations demonstrate the power of Shelley’s ur-text and offer delightful opportunities to enliven our teaching and understanding of
Frankenstein and his afterlives." -- Audrey Fisch * New Jersey City University *
"One rarely encounters scholarly territory upon which Mary Shelley's peripatetic creature has not already left its mark, but this exceptional collection has managed to uncover new and exciting ground in Frankenstein studies. In
Transmedia Creatures: Frankenstein's Afterlives, Saggini and Soccio present original interdisciplinary essays by international scholars that explore Shelley's novel as it is incarnated through the lens of multiple media and differing modes of production. Erudite and entertaining, this work gives us a fresh and often-startling view of that famous 'hideous progeny' as it is reborn in everything from fanfiction and steampunk adaptations to musical compositions and video games." -- Ghislaine McDayter * Bucknell University *
"
Chronicle of Higher Education new scholarly books weekly book list," by Nina C. Ayoub * Chronicle of Higher Education *
"The scholarship is sound. . .
Transmedia Creatures offers some exciting new avenues to explore in the wake of the bicentenary of Shelley’s novel. Recommended." * Choice *
"Saggini and Soccio’s [book] defies expectations and has a great deal to say about the pedagogical uses to which
Frankenstein’s textual afterlives might be put. [...] many of the essays in this volume, although they don’t define themselves that way, might be characterized by what we now call presentist in that they trace how cultural forebodings about the dangers of difference that preoccupy the novel get re-mediated in contemporary culture to address those same concerns. [...] All of these essays are never less than illuminating, in their varied ways, on some understudied or overlooked aspect of the novel’s afterlives, as should be obvious from the book’s title but is never a given." * European Romantic Review *
"In
Transmedia Creatures, Saggini and Soccio collect a truly international group of thirteen contributors who investigate the ways how Frankenstein adaptations traverse media, genre, and national boundaries....[T]his volume particularly appealing to instructors looking for innovation in teaching the novel." * Science Fiction Studies *
"Mary Shelley’s novel has had so many afterlives: the text lives and is constantly reincarnated as an unparalleled text of revision, rewriting, misreading, and overreading in science fiction, film, young adult literature, feminism, biomedical ethics, drama, and many other arenas. On the occasion of the anniversary of the 1818 edition of
Frankenstein, editors Francesca Saggini and Anna Enrichetta Soccio have gathered an admirably wide range of approaches to that vast afterlife. The productive analyses here of these transmedia incarnations demonstrate the power of Shelley’s ur-text and offer delightful opportunities to enliven our teaching and understanding of
Frankenstein and his afterlives." -- Audrey Fisch * New Jersey City University *
"One rarely encounters scholarly territory upon which Mary Shelley's peripatetic creature has not already left its mark, but this exceptional collection has managed to uncover new and exciting ground in Frankenstein studies. In
Transmedia Creatures: Frankenstein's Afterlives, Saggini and Soccio present original interdisciplinary essays by international scholars that explore Shelley's novel as it is incarnated through the lens of multiple media and differing modes of production. Erudite and entertaining, this work gives us a fresh and often-startling view of that famous 'hideous progeny' as it is reborn in everything from fanfiction and steampunk adaptations to musical compositions and video games." -- Ghislaine McDayter * Bucknell University *
"
Chronicle of Higher Education new scholarly books weekly book list," by Nina C. Ayoub * Chronicle of Higher Education *
"The scholarship is sound. . .
Transmedia Creatures offers some exciting new avenues to explore in the wake of the bicentenary of Shelley’s novel. Recommended." * Choice *
"Saggini and Soccio’s [book] defies expectations and has a great deal to say about the pedagogical uses to which
Frankenstein’s textual afterlives might be put. [...] many of the essays in this volume, although they don’t define themselves that way, might be characterized by what we now call presentist in that they trace how cultural forebodings about the dangers of difference that preoccupy the novel get re-mediated in contemporary culture to address those same concerns. [...] All of these essays are never less than illuminating, in their varied ways, on some understudied or overlooked aspect of the novel’s afterlives, as should be obvious from the book’s title but is never a given." * European Romantic Review *
"In
Transmedia Creatures, Saggini and Soccio collect a truly international group of thirteen contributors who investigate the ways how Frankenstein adaptations traverse media, genre, and national boundaries....[T]his volume particularly appealing to instructors looking for innovation in teaching the novel." * Science Fiction Studies *
Table of ContentsAbbreviations 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
