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Frankenstein's Monster: It's Alive!

Frankenstein's Monster: It's Alive!

Who was Frankenstein's Monster?

Read, Watch, or Listen More About Frankenstein's Monster

Link to Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi in the Catalog
Link to Mel Brook's Young Frankenstein Motion Picture in the Catalog
Link to Frankenstein by Mary Shelley in the Catalog
Link to Dean Koontz's Frankenstein: Storm Surge by Dean Koontz, Chuck Dixon & Rik Hoskin in Hoopla
Link to Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus edited by David H. Guston, Ed Finn, and Jason Scott Robert in the Catalog
Link to The Bride of Frankenstein Motion Picture in the Catalog
Link to Frankenstein Motion Picture in the Catalog
Link to Abbott, Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein DVD in the Catalog
Link to The Rocky Horror Picture Show Motion Picture in the Catalog

Give Mary Shelley the Respect She Deserves!

     I became fascinated by Mary Shelley and her most famous novel because of her husband. Back in 2011, I found myself trying to make sense of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry. It was a tricky assignment. Percy was above all a creature of his own cultural moment, and nothing dates like a zeitgeist. Yet Mary’s Frankenstein comes out of just the same heady cultural and political nexus as her husband’s verse, and her novel has continued to fascinate us. Two hundred years after its publication in January 1818, it still speaks to us directly as a myth about contemporary life. It has inspired film adaptations across genres, from the comedy caper Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein to the quasi-rock opera The Rocky Horror Picture Show and sci-fi classics such as Blade Runner. Then there’s the apparently endless schlock and kitsch in comics and cosplay (where fans dress up as their favourite fictional characters). It has become the go-to journalistic shorthand for technological interventions in human biology or medical science: Dr Frankenstein and his creature make their way in the mainstream of modern life. They reappear in our fantasies and nightmares more consistently than most fictional or historical characters. Now we can expect a slew of new Frankensteins, as everyone’s favourite scar-faced shuffling giant and his creator are remade for a new time.

     Mary has been much researched, all too often in terms of whether she was good or bad for Percy. But she hadn’t been placed at the centre of her own story since Miranda Seymour’s magisterial biography in 2000. I wanted to discover a Mary Shelley for our times: to find the girl behind the book, and to reconstruct what writing it must have been like. Continue reading from The Guardian

Link to Monsters in Literatures Resource Guide Series