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Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of the most popular novels in western literature. It has been adapted and re-assembled in countless forms, from Hammer Horror films to young-adult books and bandes dessinées. Beginning with the idea of the ‘Frankenstein Complex’, this edited collection provides a series of creative readings that explore the elaborate intertextual networks that make up the novel’s remarkable afterlife. 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.
‘culture text’. Unlike most existing scholarship, I treat melodramas and comedies based on Frankenstein with equal interest because the latter genre is typically ignored but has equal cultural force as the more ‘serious’ adaptations of the nineteenth-century stage and later films. Presumption sets the stage Returning to England from Italy in the summer of 1823, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote to Leigh Hunt (her late husband’s long-time friend and publisher), ‘Behold! I found myself famous!’ (378). The reason? A
Drawing on narrative theory, this chapter bridges understandings of security, popular culture and identity to show how stories matter. It argues that television shows are a site where gendered, raced, and nationalised identities are narrated, and particular subjectivities created. It applies this critical narrative approach to an analysis of the television series Homeland, a popular drama that tracks the efforts of the CIA to thwart the latest terrorist threat to America. This analysis considers both the meaning within Homeland and the process of meaning-making by members of the show’s British audience; in doing so, it moves away from understanding audiences as passive consumers of ideological messages contained in texts, to understanding how audiences negotiate their understanding of the show and themselves. It also considers how these terrorism stories articulate gendered and racialized boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. This links security and identity, politics and culture, texts and audiences. Although it demonstrates the articulation of identity within security stories, it also draws attention to ways that audiences can resist those identities.
subjective experience of citizens. Rather than imposing a rigid, a priori definition of the ‘political’ through the use of a limited number of proxy indicators, such approaches privilege the accounts given by citizens themselves; it is what they understand to be political in the context of their lives. While there is, as yet, no consensus on the most appropriate methodology for listening to citizens’ own accounts of what it feels like to be a citizen (or not) and establishing if and how culture texts play a role in this, there are a number of studies from which to draw. In
The church as sacred space places the reader at the heart of medieval religious life, standing inside the church with the medieval laity in order to ask what the church meant to them and why. It examines the church as a building, idea, and community, and explores the ways in which the sanctity of the church was crucial to its place at the centre of lay devotion and parish life. At a time when the parish church was facing competition for lay attention, and dissenting movements such as Lollardy were challenging the relevance of the material church, the book examines what was at stake in discussions of sanctity and its manifestations. Exploring a range of Middle English literature alongside liturgy, architecture, and material culture, the book explores the ways in which the sanctity of the church was constructed and maintained for the edification of the laity. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary theoretical approaches, the book offers a reading of the church as continually produced and negotiated by the rituals, performances, and practices of its lay communities, who were constantly being asked to attend to its material form, visual decorations, and significance. The meaning of the church was a dominant question in late-medieval religious culture and this book provides an invaluable context for students and academics working on lay religious experience and canonical Middle English texts.
Printing Terror places horror comics of the mid-twentieth century in dialogue with the anxieties of their age. It rejects the narrative of horror comics as inherently and necessarily subversive and explores, instead, the ways in which these texts manifest white male fears over America’s changing sociological landscape. It examines two eras: the pre-CCA period of the 1940s and 1950s, and the post-CCA era to 1975. The authors examine each of these periods through the lenses of war, gender, and race, demonstrating that horror comics are centred upon white male victimhood and the monstrosity of the gendered and/or racialised other. It is of interest to scholars of horror, comics studies, and American history. It is suitably accessible to be used in undergraduate classes.
discouraged dramatists from adapting Villette for other media’ (1999). Spying and surveillance in Villette There are several elements of Villette that forcibly remind us of how different the nineteenth century was from today. Especially, perhaps, in turning from the familiarity of the culture-text that is Jane Eyre to the lesser known and less adapted Villette, we are required to rethink the nineteenth century. This is an issue for adaptation, since the rhetoric of transmedial adaptation itself seems to imply that its source text is a ‘story for today’, a work with
, 1985), pp. 180–199, at p. 180. The essays in the collection were first presented as papers at a 1982 conference. 4 Ibid., pp. 181, 182. 5 James Daybell and Peter Hinds (eds), Material Readings of Early Modern Culture: Texts and Social Practices
are immune to media influence (Buckingham 2000: 213). Indeed, we found evidence to suggest that young people frequently appeared to reproduce the discourses sustained in the popular culture texts about which they talked. When discussing television programmes such as The X Factor, The Apprentice and Hell’s Kitchen, young people appeared to ‘buy into’ the wider messages in these programmes about a cruel business world and about the authority that success in the business world conferred on someone. In particular, participants seemed to reproduce discourses that
through a strategy of inversion. In folklore and in some popular culture texts, the punishment for the mortal sin of suicide is precisely to become a vampire. The consequence of the sin of unmaking is to become the embodiment of sin. Vampire suicide, particularly in instances of guilt or martyrdom, becomes a type of cleansing, made clear through the preferred means of self-slaughter: suicide by sunlight. Katarzyna Ancuta, in ‘Under the dying sun: suicide and the Gothic in modern Japanese literature and culture’, discusses the changing