Rutgers University Press Transmedia Creatures: Frankenstein's Afterlives

On the 200th anniversary of the first edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Transmedia Creatures: Frankenstein’s Afterlives 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. About the Author Francesca Saggini is Professor of English Literature at the Università della Tuscia (Viterbo). Among her books: Backstage in the Novel: Frances Burney and the Theater Arts (University of Virginia Press, 2012); Gothic Frontiers (co-ed. Glennis Byron, 2012); The House of Fiction as the House of Life: Representations of the House in Literature and Culture (co-ed. Anna Enrichetta Soccio, Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2012), The Gothic Novel and the Stage: Romantic Appropriations (Pickering & Chatto, 2015). Anna Enrichetta Soccio is Professor of English Literature at the Università G. d’Annunzio (Chieti). Among her books: Philip Larkin. Immaginazione poetica e percorsi del quotidiano (Carocci, 2008), The House of Fiction as the House of Life: Representations of the House in Literature and Culture (co-ed. Francesca Saggini, Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2012), Come leggere “Hard Times” (Solfanelli, 2014), Elizabeth Gaskell, Racconti (ed. with an Introduction and Notes, Edizioni Croce, 2017).