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intertextual references and homages, affords viewers both satisfying ‘ah ha’ moments and a richer comprehension of the complex narratives presented. Successful attempts at adjacent adaptation, such as these from Doctor Who , not only function as narrative shorthand for artists working in a truncated medium, but also remind us of the joy and play of intertextual storytelling. Doctor Who ’s first overt intersection with the Frankenstein Complex came in 1976 with ‘The Brain of Morbius’, a series written by Terrance Dicks and Robert Holmes 8 and
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.
Cultural History (2007). While Forry and Fisch delve into the specific details of the early plays, including their reception and production details, Hitchcock’s socio-historical approach narrates the evolution of the Frankenstein Complex across multiple media from the nineteenth century to the present, showing how these adaptations provide unique takes on the relevance of the Frankenstein Complex. 2 Frankenstein is certainly one of the most adapted novels, but it is not alone. Adaptations were a common sight on London’s nineteenth
’s aesthetic experiences become a personal collection of texts; or, we might say, they become part of a personal, rather than global, mythology of their own, a Frankenstein Complex, if you will. Adapting Frankenstein rests on this critical premise. We contend that an adaptation studies approach, and the idea of a Frankenstein Complex located in the minds of individuals, in fact, may offer the only real way to comprehend the web of texts that Frankenstein has become. This is true because none of us has experienced every Frankenstein adaptation. Our complexes, then, are all
Pictures’ series of loose Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, the first of which was Roger Corman’s House of Usher (1960). Beginning with Curse , Hammer’s Gothic oeuvre has since been recognised as quintessentially ‘British’, their narratives and cult stars firmly ensconced in the collective memory of British popular culture. However, as the introduction to this volume attests, the ‘Frankenstein Complex’, as well as the ‘Frankenstein Network’ upon which it is based, is a fraught issue. The very existence of this edited collection suggests that every story has been told
. Moreover, it will offer a fresh perspective on how each production adapted and constructed the sense of ‘liveness’ of the theatrical event in transmission, thereby, rather aptly, playing with the ontological concerns with the controlled constructions of liveness which lie at the heart of the Frankenstein Complex itself. 1 Finally, this chapter will open up the question: how can an engagement with the Gothic offer an appropriate lens through which to foster a significant and vigorous understanding of the contemporary constructions of liveness
melodrama the following year (Morton 60) – within an alternative nineteenth-century world that looked simultaneously back to the eighteenth-century steam inventions that began the Industrial Revolution and forward to a time when such rudimentary technology could be used to create an animate being. Thus, the method of Chiang’s adaptation of the Frankenstein Complex in ‘Seventy-Two Letters’, his placement of a new iteration of the complex into a retrofuturistic nineteenth-century setting distinguished by anachronistic technological development, is nearly as old as Shelley
Frankenstein Complex appears in ‘Little Lost Robot’ (1947), a short story that he would later include in I, Robot (1950). In that story the world-renowned robopsychologist Dr Susan Calvin learns that a colleague and mathematician, Dr Peter Bogert, has modified the First Law of Robotics, which states that ‘no robot may harm a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm’ (Asimov 431). Calvin is appalled, explaining that the First Law is the only thing that prevents robots from feeling resentment over their domination by humans, whom they view as
’, Cutchins and Perry explain in the Introduction to this book, is less a coherent text than a complex, a network of signification and exchange shaped by processes of visualisation and interpretation. Despite the number of illustrated editions of Frankenstein , few writers have addressed how they contribute to the Frankenstein Complex or its visual lexicon. 2 Unlike stage productions and film adaptations, which purport to convey the Frankenstein story in its entirety, illustrations present isolated moments that punctuate the prose text against
and Forbidden Planet provides a good example of the how the Frankenstein Complex can expose unexpected affinities between texts to reveal unrecognised adaptations. While the source texts suggested by Buchanan and others are plausible lenses through which to read Forbidden Planet , none takes account of the film’s Cold War context. It is this anxious post-war period, combining fear of a nuclear holocaust with unprecedented economic bounty (Worland and Slayden 140, 143), that sets the stage for seeing the film as a contemporary