Adapting Frankenstein : The Monster's Eternal Lives in Popular Culture

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of the most popular works in the history of western literature. It has been adapted and re-assembled in countless forms, from Hammer Horror films to young-adult books and bandes dessinées. This collection provides a series of creative readings exploring the elaborate intertextual networks that make up the novel’s remarkable afterlife.

Other classic texts produce adaptations from time to time, but Frankenstein has reached critical mass, with new versions appearing continually. This potentially infinite grid of intertexts, here termed the ‘Frankenstein Network’, enables a new way of reading adaptations in the light of other texts on the grid. The adaptation-studies approaches found in this book focus on the complex relationships between the various texts, disparate traditions, and dynamic media in which Frankenstein has been adapted.

As the most comprehensive collection of essays to date on why and how Frankenstein has been adapted, this is an ideal book for class explorations of adaptation theory, Frankenstein studies, Gothic horror, and Dark Romanticism. It broadens the scope of research on Frankenstein while deepening our understanding of a text that, 200 years after its original publication, continues to intrigue and terrify us in new and unexpected ways.