Abstract
Penny Dreadful, which stitches together characters and plot elements from canonical nineteenth-century British horror novels, invites audiences to reflect on its own status as an adaptation whenever it puts curated collections onscreen. One such collection—the anthology—shows up metaphorically through the series’ adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). By repeatedly placing lines from famous Romantic poems in the mouth of the stitched-together being that Victor Frankenstein reanimates, Penny Dreadful acknowledges its medial overlap with the anthology and explores the proposition that individual “being” amounts to a process of self-curation and adaptation from what we read. The essay contends that Penny Dreadful imports this idea from Frankenstein, helping render visible how Shelley’s novel was always in part about its own medial relationship to the anthology.
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Notes
- 1.
Some readers will rightly recognize this statement’s congruence with Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s influential concept of the “double-logic” of remediation, which holds that even as media strive to achieve immediacy with what they mediate, they also call attention to mediation, something that becomes most noticeable when they refer to or incorporate other media (e.g., a radio broadcast playing within a film, a pixelated image of a manila folder on a computer desktop, and so forth) (Bolter and Grusin 2–18).
- 2.
As late as 1892, the publisher of the “Penny Popular Novels” abridged version of Frankenstein was still able to advertise it to prospective readers by saying, “Everybody has heard of Frankenstein. But comparatively few have read the weird and powerful novel which made the name Frankenstein one of the symbol words of the language” (qtd. in St. Clair 645).
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Goode, M. (2023). Penny Dreadful and Frankensteinian Collection: Museums, Anthologies, and Other Monstrous Media from Shelley to Showtime. In: Grossman, J., Scheibel, W. (eds) Penny Dreadful and Adaptation. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12180-7_4
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