Never Dead: Mary Shelley's <em>Frankenstein</em>

Abstract

253 NEVER DEAD: SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN REVIEW-ESSAYS Nicole Lobdell Never Dead: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Carol Margaret Davison and Marie Mulvey-Roberts, eds. Global Frankenstein. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, STUDIES IN GLOBAL SCIENCE FICTION, 2018. xxvi+344 pp. $119.99 hc, $89 ebk. Francesca Saggini and Anna Enrichetta Soccio, eds. Transmedia Creatures: Frankenstein’s Afterlives. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2018. 296 pp. $29.95 pbk. Celebrating the bicentennial of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) has taken many forms in the past several years: plays, ballets, festivals, foods, films, books, digital media, lectures, workshops, museum displays, and conferences, among others. In her 25 October 2018 New York Times article “Frankenstein at 200,” Jennifer Schuessler writes that The novel’s 200th anniversary has inspired a cavalcade of exhibitions, performances and events around the world, from Ingolstadt, the Bavarian home of Victor Frankenstein’s fictional lab, to the hell mouth of Indiana, which in a bid to become the epicenter of American Franken-frenzy, has held more than 600 events since January [2018]. There is clearly no lack of interest in Frankenstein and the novel remains a wellspring of scholarly and artistic inspiration even after two hundred years. In her foreword to Global Frankenstein, Nora Crook points out what every scholar of Frankenstein already knows: “the extraordinary proliferation of texts, contexts, and adaptations has surpassed the capacity of any single person to encompass them all” (ix). With such abundance, it truly is impossible to keep abreast of everything Frankenstein-related. Not even the most ardent fan of Frankenstein could attend hundreds of events in one year. The next best thing, then, are edited collections such as these that “open up spaces where specialism can converse with specialism” (Global ix); they offer readers an internationally inspired and global look at Frankenstein today. Together, Global Frankenstein and Transmedia Creatures: Frankenstein’s Afterlives offer thirty original chapters that cover a wide and wild variety of topics from history to the financial crisis, from film to plastic surgery, from video games to children’s literature, from steampunk aesthetics to memes, and from music to young adult fiction. In her foreword, Crook writes that as recently as 2009 new research was emerging that may change the way we view the novel: “In 2009, Julia Douthwaite discovered a precursor, Fèlix Nogaret’s political allegory, Le Miroir des événemens actuels (1790), in which a scientist called Frankénstëin makes a full-sized mechanical man who plays 254 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) the flute” (ix). Such a discovery demonstrates that even after two centuries Shelley’s novel is still revealing itself to us. In their introduction to Global Frankenstein, Davison and Mulvey-Roberts acknowledge that their volume “cannot fully convey the ... scope of Frankenstein’s worldwide influence or capture the extent of its continued popularity” (8), in part because the collection is comprised solely of work by English-speaking scholars. What Global Frankenstein endeavors to do, and in my opinion does very well, “is [to] grant some sense of the novel’s enormous influence across eras, genres, and artistic forms, reconsidering, where and when necessary, the original novel in the contexts of its historical and intellectual roots and its many reverberations—aesthetic, socio-political, religious, and philosophical” (9). Even though the contributors may take as their primary focus adaptations inspired by earlier adaptations, they all trace their lineages back to the “mother-text as they consider its global reach and impact” (9). This lineage is also demonstrated in the identities of Global Frankenstein’s seventeen contributors, from emerging scholars to established ones, and in the interdisciplinarity and diversity of their research fields, including but not limited to literature, art, medicine, media studies, aesthetics, film, theater, and video game studies. In Transmedia Creatures, Saggini and Soccio collect a truly international group of thirteen contributors who investigate the ways how Frankenstein adaptations traverse media, genre, and national boundaries. In her introduction, Saggini writes that their chapters “attest to this extraordinary plasticity and are designed to unlock new, richer readings of the novel” (3). Saggini makes an important point, and one that we often overlook or forget when thinking about adaptations and the afterlives of texts: “an afterlife...