Abstract
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a text read by completely different groups of readers, and therefore it may be a tempting medium for research on interpretive communities. The paper analyses the possible strategies of elite and popular interpretations. For a typical elite strategy it uses the myth of Prometheus as interpretive subtext of the novel, while as an example of typical popular interpretation it makes use of Kenneth Branagh’s film-adaptation. The differences can be regarded as the result of loss of meaning, since the sophisticated connections that can be elaborated in a professional reading simply disappear in a popular one; but a popular reading involves not only loss, since new meanings appear through an intertextual process of popular interpretation that adapts the text to horror genre conventions more closely. Features that seem adequate to the popular genre tend to be highly emphasised, while, as a negative correlate of this very same process, features that are unfamiliar with the popular genre are simply omitted.
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