Mary Shelley / Transmedia Creatures: Frankenstein’s Afterlives

2021

The Gothic and the Rule of Law, 1764–1820, 2007

In conclusion, I wish to return first to issues of authorship, authority, literary 'origin' and generic expectation that surface in relation to the late-eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century texts of Godwin and Maturin. These novels, I have argued, mark a shift in the Gothic's relation to the modern rule of law, a shift that finds its fullest expression in this period, I suggest, in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The responses to these works (not least by the authors themselves) also reveal anxieties concerning questions of literary and political production and reproduction that tended in this period to centre upon and to be articulated through the Gothic. Godwin's preface to the first edition of Caleb Williams in 1794, for example, makes quite plain the radical political intent of the work. The fiction aims to communicate to a much wider readership a political truth well known to philosophers 'that government intrudes itself into every rank of society this is a truth highly worthy to be communicated to persons whom books of philosophy and science are never likely to be read'. 1 The form that this work takes is thus designed explicitly to extend its reach beyond the class to which the Political Enquiry would have been accessible. The preface posits the fiction as more significant in political than in literary terms and its subversive potential was acknowledged a year later when Godwin's publisher added a note to the subsequent edition explaining why this preface had been withdrawn from the original publication in May 1794: This preface was withdrawn in the original edition in compliance with the alarms of booksellers. 'Caleb Williams' made his first appearance in the world, in the same month in which the sanguinary plot 165

Global Frankenstein, 2018

Perhaps in line with Percy Bysshe Shelley's Preface to Mary Shelley's original Frankenstein of 1818, which insists that the novel eschews 'supernatural terrors' (Shelley 2012: 5), some modern scholars see its use of the 'Gothic [as] just a façade' for an exploration of more serious issues (Knellwolf 2008: 64), including those raised at the time by the 'growing tensions between various kinds of science' throughout the Western world (Hunter 2008: 135). But I want to argue here, not only that the 1818 Frankenstein is quite thoroughly Gothic, but that it employs the kinds of figures initiated by Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), the first prose narrative to call itself A Gothic Story in its Second Edition of 1765 (see Walpole 1996: 3), precisely to articulate several specific 'tensions' troubling the burgeoning sciences of the West from the 1750s to the 1810s. Frankenstein's creature, after all, the young anatomist's principal display of science in action, looks back, not just to Erasmus Darwin's rumoured animation of dead matter recalled by Mary Shelley in the Introduction to her 1831 revision (Shelley 2012: 168) but also, she says

2018

Introduction In this paper, it will be discussed whether the Gothic characteristics are displayed in the piece of fiction called Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. As David Punter describes, “When thinking of the Gothic novel, a set of characteristics springs readily to mind: an emphasis on portraying the terrifying, a common insistence on archaic settings, a prominent use of the supernatural, the presence of highly stereotyped characters and the attempt to deploy and perfect techniques of literary suspense are the most significant.” (Punter 1) The aim of the analysis is to discover if the different Gothic conventions are present in the novel and how they are featured, as well as the exploration of different topics of importance for the analysis of the novel. In order to explore the Gothic in the novel, five topics will be considered in detail. The first topic will be Nature and the Sublime, the second one will be Industrialization vs Nature, then the concept of Alienation will be also analyzed, the fourth topic will be The monster as the Other and lastly, Traditional Gothic elements in the story will be examined. To fulfil this objective, ideas presented by authors such as David Punter, Ronald Carter , Proshanta Sarkar, Kelly Hurley and Michael Gamer will be considered. Some information about the author and the novel can be found below.

Against the background of the current scholarly debate on the Neo-Gothic fascination with the body manipulation and dissection, this paper examines some recent transmutations of the archetype of the hybrid monster of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. More specifically, the paper focuses on Shelley Jackson's production, from the hypertexts Patchtwork Girl, or A Modern Monster (1995) and My Body. A Wunderkammer (1997) to The Melancholy of Anatomy (2002), up to her most recent project Skin (2010). Although she cannot be strictly considered part of the Neo-Gothic stream, her works exemplify significant ways in which post human thought intersects with Gothic textuality. By reimagining Frankenstein's archetype of the assembled creature, Jackson explores emerging postmodern paradigms of disturbingly porous and disjointed identities in the context of digital culture.

2018

Against the background of the current scholarly debate on the Neo-Gothic fascination with the body manipulation and dissection, this paper examines some recent transmutations of the archetype of the hybrid monster of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. More specifically, the paper focuses on Shelley Jackson's production, from the hypertexts Patchtwork Girl, or A Modern Monster (1995) and My Body. A Wunderkammer (1997) to The Melancholy of Anatomy (2002), up to her most recent project Skin (2010). Although she cannot be strictly considered part of the Neo-Gothic stream, her works exemplify significant ways in which post human thought intersects with Gothic textuality. By reimagining Frankenstein's archetype of the assembled creature, Jackson explores emerging postmodern paradigms of disturbingly porous and disjointed identities in the context of digital culture.

Revista de Letras Juçara, 2018

This article aims to analyze the novel Frankenstein, by Mary W. Shelley, from a perspective of literary genres. The work is believed to manifest both traits of the Gothic genre––due to its structure and common themes to the period it was published––and of what would in future be called the Science fiction genre. Those elements are here observed, in the novel as well as in the context of its creation. In this sense, there is a convergence of genres taking place, albeit one of them is in its nascent form: Shelley's novel antecipate a scientific interest that would be specified in later fiction, being derived from her legacy. Tzvetan Todorov's perspective is considered, inasmuch as he defends the presence of multiple genres inside a work of fiction, as well as the creation of new literary genres from other, pre-existent, ones. It is concluded that the novel manifests enough elements to comprise both the genres here discussed, with its common and different traits.

Women's Studies, 2018

The creature of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) may have led a solitary life ostracized and unloved, but these days he has plenty of friends in the countless imitations, adaptations, and interpretations he has provoked. The present study by Eileen Hunt Botting adds to the growing body of political readings sustained by the novel in recent years, including the work of Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, and disability scholars, to a name a few prominent types. Devoted exclusively to Frankenstein and written by a political theorist, Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child attests to the novel's ongoing salience. Seeking to convince her colleagues in political science of literature's evidentiary value, Botting makes the sort of grand case for fiction that we literary scholars are no longer much used to making: "The novel form allows for this sort of big and open-ended philosophical question to be entertained by readers from a variety of temporal contexts, cultural backgrounds, and political perspectives" (8). With this philosophizing remit, Botting presents Frankenstein as a mental laboratory for running a series of "thought experiments" about children and the rights they are due. Literature, in this view, seems a good way to experiment on humans without having to obtain IRB approval. Botting asks that we "see the Creature for who he really was: a stateless orphan, abandoned by family, abused by society and ignored by the law" (xi). By casting the creature as "a giant baby" (13), his tale can be read as a parable on the perils that lie in the abandonment and abuse of children. Dismissing the Gothic apparatus that surrounds this archetypal "monster," Bot-Modern Philology, volume 116, number 3.