Overview

Placing Frankenstein in the critical frameworks of book history and secondary authorship, this book explores the increasing array of book-based reworkings of, and sequels to, the novel that up to this point, have been largely ignored. Covering novels, novellas and short stories across a range of genres from romance to YA fiction, Frankenstein Retold examines a broad range of these texts in different purviews and demonstrates their own critical value as well and pertinence for understanding new approaches to literary adaptation in theory and practice more broadly. Organised thematically, the book cover topics including: filial characterisation; continuations and sequels explicitly tied to Shelley’s narrative; epistolary, journal-based, found-text and other storytelling forms; coquels set against the original material; fiction in which Shelley’s materials have been transplanted to entirely new settings, periods or genres; cameos; and the ghostly presence of the original author. A testament to the vitality of the original story more than two centuries after it first appeared, Daniel Cook explores works from a huge range of writers such as Peter Ackroyd, Jeanette Winterson, Ahmed Saadawi, Suzanne Weyne, Jon Skovron, William A. Chandler, Susan Heyboer Okeefe, Hailey Bailey, Laurie Sheck, Edward M. Erdelac, Fred Saberhagen and Kate Horsley among many others. With a large body of scholarship already exploring the rich cinematic, transmedial and cultural afterlife of Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein Retold offers a bridge between literary studies notions of book history and authorship, and media studies approaches to transmedia storytelling, between fan writing and media production histories.

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9781350501959

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Reviews

Set against a marching hoard of Frankenstein scholarship that tends to focus disproportionately on Shelley’s cinematic afterlives, this book makes a fresh intervention by considering the literary, book-based adaptations that animate the enduring myth of Frankenstein. Treating Frankenstein as a “foundational allegory of Gothic authorship,” this book provides a formal analysis and taxonomy of the exciting and at times monstrous literary experiments that unfold and feed into one another as contemporary authors rewrite and reassemble Shelley’s “hideous progeny.” Original and compelling, this is a must-read for scholars interested in Shelley or the Gothic, or in how literature continues to reinvent itself. * Kirstin Mills, Senior Lecturer, Macquarie University, Australia *

Author Information

Daniel Cook is Associate Dean and Reader in English Literature at the University of Dundee, UK. He is the author of Walter Scott and Short Fiction (2021), Reading Swift’s Poetry (2020), and Thomas Chatterton and Neglected Genius, 1760-1830 (2013). His most recent books include The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver's Travels, with Nicholas Seager (2023), Gulliver’s Travels: The Norton Library (2023), Scottish Poetry, 1730-1830 (2023), and Austen After 200: New Reading Spaces, with Annika Bautz and Kerry Sinanan (2022).

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