New Book: Penny Dreadful and Adaptation: Reanimating and Transforming the Monster

Penny Dreadful and Adaptation: Reanimating and Transforming the Monster

Editors: Julie Grossman and Will Scheibel

Palgrave Macmillan, 2023

Available from SpringerLink in print, as an ebook, and as individual chapters. Full details at https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-12180-7. 


Experiments with recent interdisciplinary methodologies to understand the mechanisms of adaptation more broadly


Conceptualizes adaptation beyond the traditional dyad of literature and screen media


Explores the relationship between text, context, and intertext to understand how meaning is made and remade


Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture (PSADVC)

About this book

This edited collection is the first book-length critical study of the Showtime-Sky Atlantic television series Penny Dreadful (2014-2016), which also includes an analysis of Showtime’s 2020 spin-off City of Angels. Chapters examine the status of the series as a work of twenty-first-century cable television, contemporary Gothic-horror, and intermedial adaptation, spanning sources as diverse as eighteenth and nineteenth-century British fiction and poetry, American dime novels, theatrical performance, Hollywood movies, and fan practices. Featuring iconic monsters such as Dr. Frankenstein and his Creature, the “bride” of Frankenstein, Dracula, the werewolf, Dorian Gray, and Dr. Jekyll, Penny Dreadful is a mash-up of familiar texts and new Gothic figures such as spiritualist Vanessa Ives, played by the magnetic Eva Green. As a recent example of adapting multiple sources in different media, Penny Dreadful has as much to say about the Romantic and Victorian eras as it does about our present-day fascination with screen monsters.

Contents

Front Matter

Pages i-xviii



Introduction

Julie Grossman, Will Scheibel

Pages 1-11



Welcome to the Night: Issues of Reading and Media

The Medium Is the Model

Thomas Leitch

Pages 15-30

The Adaptive Marketing of Penny Dreadful: Listening to The Dreadfuls

Christine Becker

Pages 31-47

Penny Dreadful and Frankensteinian Collection: Museums, Anthologies, and Other Monstrous Media from Shelley to Showtime

Mike Goode

Pages 49-67



Anatomy of a Monster: Horror and the Gothic in Literature and on the Screen

In the House of the Night Creatures: Penny Dreadful’s Dracula

Joan Hawkins

Pages 71-86

Vampirism, Blood, and Memory in Penny Dreadful and Only Lovers Left Alive

Luciana Tamas, Eckart Voigts

Pages 87-104

“The Dead Place”: Cosmopolitan Gothic in Penny Dreadful’s London

Kendall R. Phillips

Pages 105-120

Adapting the Universal Classic Monsters in Penny Dreadful: An Uncanny Resurrection

Will Scheibel

Pages 121-137



The Monster Unbound: Theatrical Performance, Western Dime Novels, and TV Noir

Penny Dreadful and the Stage: Lessons in Horror and Heritage

Shannon Wells-Lassagne

Pages 141-155

Ethan Chandler, Penny Dreadful, and the Dime Novel; or, Dancing with American Werewolves in London

Ann M. Ryan

Pages 157-176

Dreadful Noir, Adaptation, and City of Angels: “Monsters, All, Are We Not?”

Julie Grossman, Phillip Novak

Pages 177-193



Meanings of Monstrosity: Identity, Difference, and Experience

Penny Dreadful’s Palimpsestuous Bride of Frankenstein

Lissette Lopez Szwydky

Pages 197-215

Predators Far and Near: The Sadean Gothic in Penny Dreadful

Lindsay Hallam

Pages 217-232

“All Those Sacred Midnight Things”: Queer Authorship, Veiled Desire, and Divine Transgression in Penny Dreadful

James Bogdanski

Pages 233-252

Borderland Identities in Penny Dreadful: City of Angels

Seda Öz

Pages 253-267



Back Matter

Pages 269-282

About the editors

Julie Grossman is a professor of English and Communication and Film Studies at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, NY, USA. Her monographs include Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny (2015), Ida Lupino, Director (with Therese Grisham, 2017), Twin Peaks (with Will Scheibel, 2020), and The Femme Fatale (2020). She is co-editor (with R. Barton Palmer) of the essay collection Adaptation in Visual Culture (2017) and (with Marc C. Conner and R. Barton Palmer) Screening Contemporary Irish Fiction and Drama (2022).

Will Scheibel is an associate professor of English at Syracuse University, USA, where he teaches film and screen studies. He is the author of Gene Tierney: Star of Hollywood’s Home Front (2022) and, with Julie Grossman, co-author of Twin Peaks (2020).

Madame Frankenstein Collected

Image Comics recently released a collected edition of the Madame Frankenstein series, an intriguing blend of the Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein stories, Shaw's Pygmalion, masculine rivalry, and (for some reason) the Cotttingley fairies all set in 1932 Boston. The story, told in black and white as befitting the era, is worth a read, though the art seems a bit too cartoonish for the tone. Covers are reprinted with the story, but they have been reproduced in black and white as opposed to the original color (see them at the Grand Comics Database: http://www.comics.org/series/80562/covers/). Details from the publisher follow below.

MADAME FRANKENSTEIN TP
https://imagecomics.com/comics/releases/madame-frankenstein-tp
Story By: Jamie S. Rich
Art By: Megan Levens
Cover By: Joelle Jones
Cover By: Nick Filardi
Published: March 18, 2015
Diamond ID: DEC140674

In 1932, Vincent Krall sets out to create his perfect woman by reanimating the corpse of the love of his life. He’ll soon discover, however, that man was never meant to peer beyond the veil between life and death, and a woman is not as easily controlled as he believes. The collected MADAME FRANKENSTEIN contains all the covers by Helheim artist JOËLLE JONES and an exclusive gallery section showcasing MEGAN LEVENS’ development process. Collects MADAME FRANKENSTEIN #1-7.

 Print: $16.99

Thoughts on Hotel Transylvania

The animated feature film Hotel Transylvania offers insight into the (after)lives of the Universal Studios monsters following their appearance in the films of the 1930s. The film focuses on Dracula and his young daughter and how the two must come to accept humans as good people rather than (as the film initially presents) threats to their very existence. The other monsters are much more reluctant to embrace humanity, but the appearance of a young human in their hitherto human-free enclave (the eponymous Hotel Transylvania) helps them all to change their views.

Overall, this is a cute family-friendly film, though the final scene (an attempt to mimic the finale of Shrek II) is rather incongruous.

Mickey Mouse as Frankenstein!

Sorry to have missed this. It looks like a Halloween promotion. Details (for now) at http://www.disneystore.com/mickey-mouse-halloween-tee-for-men/mp/1336276/1000228/. The image on the tee shirt also glows in the dark.

The First Family of Fright

First airing in the mid 1960s, The Munsters, a series inspired by the Universal horror films of the 1930s and '40s and depicting friendlier versions of their monstrous cast, remains a popular series with a number of reboots (the latest, Mockingbird Lane, airing last October) and continuations.