The Afterlives of Frankenstein: Popular and Artistic Adaptations and Reimaginings

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.

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.