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).

Out Now: Lovecraftian Proceedings No. 4

Lovecraftian Proceedings No. 4 

Edited by Dennis P. Quinn and Elena Tchougounova-Paulson 

Purchase from Hippocampus Press: https://www.hippocampuspress.com/journals/lovecraftian-proceedings/lovecraftian-proceedings-no.-4

ISBN 9781614983613


February 2022

304 pp 

$20.00

Cover art by Pete Von Sholly




This fourth volume of selected papers from the Dr. Henry M. Armitage Memorial Scholarship Symposium, delivered at NecronomiCon Providence 2019, contains an array of groundbreaking articles on Lovecraft’s life, work, and thought. Papers by Kyle Gamache and Thomas Schwaiger, focus on Lovecraft’s relations with his brilliant young friend R. H. Barlow, whose story “The Night Ocean” is one of the finest weird tales of its era. Elena Tchougounova-Paulson and Christian Roy address connections between Lovecraft’s work and that of the philosophers Alexander Blok and Georges Bataille.

Benjamin Davis studies contemporary views of Tibet in reference to Lovecraft’s citation of that obscure realm. Heather Poirier traces the relationship of Lovecraft’s work with the Southern literature of his time, while Jeremiah Dylan Cook probes the influence of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herbert S. Gorman on “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” Other papers discuss the Necronomicon, such seminal tales as “The Outsider,” “Pickman’s Model,” “The Colour out of Space,” and At the Mountains of Madness, and other vital topics. In all, the essays in this volume constitute cutting-edge scholarship on one of the most provocative authors of his time.



TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword

Niels-Viggo S. Hobbs



Introduction: Haunting Phantasms—A Bookworm Edition

Elena Tchougounova-Paulson and Dennis P. Quinn



Zahhak Beside Cthulhu: Philosophizing with Monsters in Persian Mythology and American Horror

Robert Landau Ames



The Influence of The Great Game on the Writings of H. P. Lovecraft: The Opening of Tibet and the Creation of Leng

Benjamin Davis



The Necronomicon Yalensis and Lovecraft in Connecticut

Edward Guimont



Lovecraft’s Archive: Materiality and Readership in Lovecraft’s Fiction

Cole Donovan



The Outsiders: Mapping Lovecraft’s Loathing

Paul Neimann



The Ebb of Sanity: “The Night Ocean” and Bipolar Disorder

Kyle Gamache



The Weird Within the Real: Common Territories in Lovecraft’s Fiction and Southern Literature

Heather Poirier



A Lover of Past Phantoms: Lovecraftian Reflections in R. H. Barlow’s Life and Work

Thomas Schwaiger



American Frankensteins: George Porter and George Poe, and Their Attempts to Reanimate the Dead in New England

Michael J. Bielawa



Encounters in the Mountains of Madness: H. P. Lovecraft and Werner Herzog at the World’s End

Lúcio Reis-Filho, Laura Cánepa, and Jamer de Mello



Fear and (Non) Fiction: Agrarian Anxiety in “The Colour out of Space”

Antonio Alejandro Barroso



Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herbert S. Gorman’s Shadows over Innsmouth

Jeremiah Dylan Cook



Neo-Gothic Decadence as a Pervasive Challenge in the Works of H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, and Alexander Blok

Elena Tchougounova-Paulson



Lovecraft’s Accursed Share in Bataille’s General Economy: Antiutilitarian Cosmologies and Anti-capitalist Social Visions

Christian Roy



A Sequence of Paintings So Horrible: Montage in Visual Adaptations of “Pickman’s Model

Nathaniel R. Wallace



Contributors



Appendix: Abstracts from the Fourth Biennial Dr. Henry Armitage Memorial Scholarship Symposium of New Weird Fiction and Lovecraft-Related Research Providence, RI, 23–25 August 2019

Dennis P. Quinn, Chair



Index

CFP Gothic in the Nineteenth Century (7/15/2018; Loyola University Chicago 10/27/2018)

CFP Deadline Extended: “Hideous Progeny”: The Gothic in the Nineteenth Century (7/15/2018; 10/27/2018)
https://www.navsa.org/2018/06/14/cfp-deadline-extended-hideous-progeny-the-gothic-in-the-nineteenth-century-7-15-2018-10-27-2018/
Jun 14, 2018

“Hideous Progeny”: The Gothic in the Nineteenth Century

Lake Shore Campus, Klarcheck Information Commons, 4th floor

October 27, 2018, 8:30am-5:30pm



“And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper.”
Mary Shelley, 1831 Introduction to Frankenstein

In this truly Gothic year, the Loyola University Chicago Victorian Society celebrates both the bicentennial of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and the birth of Emily Brontë, author of Wuthering Heights (1847), two famous Gothic novels which sparked questions regarding the potential of human connections across social classes, time, and death itself. Subsequent authors of Gothic fiction similarly employed this genre to interrogate the breakdown of patriarchal family structures, systems of power and reproduction, sexual, religious, and socio-political taboos and norms, reinterpret previous literatures, and reject contemporary notions of the limits of reality, scientific possibility, and human progress. Given the 19th-century recognition of the Gothic as an unstable, versatile space that can function as a surprising and subversive mechanism for social critique, the Loyola University Chicago Victorian Society asks what are the possibilities, values, narrative strategies, ideas, versions, mutations, and adaptations of the nineteenth century Gothic? Over the course of the nineteenth century, what endured, progressed, and morphed in this genre, and why?

The Loyola University Chicago Victorian Society solicits paper proposals addressing Gothic questionings of texts, bodies, and the supernatural. Possible CFP categories include but are not limited to the following:

• textual studies and digital humanities
• narrative theory
• adaptations
• history of science
• queer theory
• women and gender studies
• art and architecture
• post-colonial studies
• the gothic and the neo-gothic
• mutations, perversions, and disability studies.

Plenary Speaker: Alison Booth (University of Virginia)

Keynote Speaker: Suzy Anger (University of British Columbia)

Please send abstracts no longer than 300 words to lucvictoriansociety@gmail.com no later than 15 July 2018.

In the weeks and months ahead, more details will be forthcoming on our website: http://lucvictoriansociety.wix.com/lucvs.

Frankenstein and the Fantastic Blog

The Fantastic (Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction) Area is pleased to announce the launch of its new outreach effort, Frankenstein and the Fantastic. The new blog can be accessed at http://frankensteinandthefantastic.blogspot.com/.

I will eventually be migrating the Frankenstein related links from this site to the new one. 

Michael Torregrossa
Area Chair

Reading List: Monstrous Progeny

Another Frankenstein book released this summer:

Monstrous Progeny: A History of the Frankenstein Narratives
https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/monstrous-progeny/9780813564234

By Lester D. Friedman, Allison B. Kavey

256 pages, 37 photographs, 6 x 9

Paper,August 1, 2016$27.95
978-0-8135-6423-4

Cloth,August 1, 2016$90.00
978-0-8135-6424-1

PDF,August 1, 2016$27.95
978-0-8135-6425-8

EPUB,August 1, 2016$27.95
978-0-8135-7370-0

About This Book

Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein is its own type of monster mythos that will not die, a corpus whose parts keep getting harvested to animate new artistic creations. What makes this tale so adaptable and so resilient that, nearly 200 years later, it remains vitally relevant in a culture radically different from the one that spawned its birth?

 

Monstrous Progeny takes readers on a fascinating exploration of the Frankenstein family tree, tracing the literary and intellectual roots of Shelley’s novel from the sixteenth century and analyzing the evolution of the book’s figures and themes into modern productions that range from children’s cartoons to pornography. Along the way, media scholar Lester D. Friedman and historian Allison B. Kavey examine the adaptation and evolution of Victor Frankenstein and his monster across different genres and in different eras. In doing so, they demonstrate how Shelley’s tale and its characters continue to provide crucial reference points for current debates about bioethics, artificial intelligence, cyborg lifeforms, and the limits of scientific progress. 

 

Blending an extensive historical overview with a detailed analysis of key texts, the authors reveal how the Frankenstein legacy arose from a series of fluid intellectual contexts and continues to pulsate through an extraordinary body of media products. Both thought-provoking and entertaining, Monstrous Progeny offers a lively look at an undying and significant cultural phenomenon.

 

 

Table of Contents

 

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Singing the Body Electric

1         In a Country of Eternal Light: Frankenstein’s Intellectual History

2         The Instruments of Life: Frankenstein’s Medical History

3         A More Horrid Contrast: From the Page to the Stage

4         It’s Still Alive: The Universal and Hammer Movie Cycles

5         The House of Frankenstein: Mary Shelley’s Step Children

6         Fifty Ways to Leave Your Monster

           Notes

           Select Bibliography

           Index

 

 

Reading List: Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein

I was pretty excited to discover this book over the summer. It looks like an invaluable resource. 

The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein
http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/english-literature-1700-1830/cambridge-companion-frankenstein?format=PB

Part of Cambridge Companions to Literature
Editor: Andrew Smith

Date Published: August 2016
format: Paperback (Also available in hardcover and as an ebook)
isbn: 9781107450608
length: 288 pages
dimensions: 227 x 151 x 15
contains: 10 b/w illus.

The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein consists of sixteen original essays on Mary Shelley's novel by leading scholars, providing an invaluable introduction to Frankenstein and its various critical contexts. Theoretically informed but accessibly written, this volume relates Frankenstein to various social, literary, scientific and historical contexts, and outlines how critical theories such as ecocriticism, posthumanism, and queer theory generate new and important discussion in illuminating ways. The volume also explores the cultural afterlife of the novel including its adaptations in various media such as drama, film, television, graphic novels, and literature aimed at children and young adults. Written by an international team of leading experts, the essays provide new insights into the novel and the various critical approaches which can be applied to it. The volume is an essential guide to students and academics who are interested in Frankenstein and who wish to know more about its complex literary history.

• Provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of the novel using a number of different approaches by leading scholars
• Explores themes and theories such as gender and identity, the environment, politics and science of the time
• Looks at Frankenstein in popular culture today including adaptations on stage, television, the graphic novel and in children's literature

Table of Contents

Introduction Andrew Smith

Part I. Historical and Literary Contexts:
1. Frankenstein: its composition and publication Charles E. Robinson
2. Contextualising sources Lisa Vargo
3. Romantic contexts Jerrold E. Hogle
4. The context of the novel Catherine Lanone
5. Scientific contexts Andrew Smith
6. Frankenstein's politics Adriana Craciun

Part II. Theories and Forms:
7. The female Gothic Angela Wright
8. What is queer about Frankenstein? George E. Haggerty
9. Race and Frankenstein Patrick Brantlinger
10. Frankenstein and ecocriticism Timothy Morton
11. The posthuman Andy Mousley

Part III. Adaptations:
12. Dramatic adaptations of Frankenstein Diane Long Hoeveler
13. Frankenstein and film Mark Jancovich
14. Literature David Punter
15. Frankenstein in comics and graphic novels Christopher Murray
16. Growing up Frankenstein: adaptations for young readers Karen Coats and Farran Norris Sands


EditorAndrew Smith, University of Sheffield
Andrew Smith is Reader in Nineteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Sheffield. His 18 books include the forthcoming Gothic Death 1740–1914: A Literary History, The Ghost Story 1840–1920: A Cultural History (2010), Gothic Literature (2007, revised edition 2013), Victorian Demons (2004) and Gothic Radicalism (2000). He edits, with Benjamin Fisher, the award-winning series Gothic Literary Studies and Gothic Authors: Critical Revisions. He also edits, with William Hughes, The Edinburgh Companions to the Gothic series. He is a past President of the International Gothic Association.

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

CFP The Automated Body (Spec Issue) (8/15/15)

CFP: ESC—“‘Fear, Love, and Confusion’: A Special Issue on the AUTOMATED BODY” (Deadline: August 15, 2015)
http://accute.ca/2015/05/28/call-for-papers-esc-fear-love-and-confusion-a-special-issue-on-the-automated-body-deadline-august-15-2015/
BY INFOACCUTE ON MAY 28, 2015

ESC—“‘Fear, Love, and Confusion’: A Special Issue on the AUTOMATED BODY”
Deadline for submission of abstracts or completed papers: August 15, 2015

ESC: English Studies in Canada invites submissions for a special issue on the automated body, edited by Cecily Devereux and Marcelle Kosman, to be published Spring 2016. This special issue is situated in response to an expanding range of questions and concerns about humans and automation in early twenty-first-century cultural representation. Such questions and concerns are arguably evident in representation from the earliest days of mechanization and industrialization in the late eighteenth century, and what a scant twenty years ago were referred to as “cybercultures” have been the focus for nearly three decades of academic considerations. Contemporary cultural texts, we suggest, demonstrate a renewed engagement with questions of the implications of the convergence of the biological with the mechanical and the relationships and the limits of what Donna Haraway characterized in her 1985 “Cyborg Manifesto” as “couplings between organism and machine” and the “fear, love, and confusion” they generate. If fear is evident in what a 2014 New York Times op-ed (June 22) characterized as “robot-worriers’” concerns about automation and unemployment in the workplace, to take only one example, love of—and confusion regarding—human-machine convergences is evident in proliferating stories of transformation, connection, and relationship such as the 2014 film Her and Allison de Fren’s 2012 documentary The Mechanical Bride. This special issue of ESC is interested in questions of automated bodies broadly conceived. It undertakes to bring into conversation a range of papers focused on any aspect of bodies and automation in cultural representation across media and disciplines. We are interested in automated embodiment as a distinctively contemporary concern yet also/and as well in the histories and archaeologies of such embodiment across periods and contexts.

• Bodies and/as machines; anthropomorphized machines; mechanical enhancement; prosthetics
• Cybernetics, biomedical engineering, genetic engineering; new eugenics and reproductive technologies
• Science fiction, fantasy, speculative and dystopic fiction and film; genres and subgenres: cyberpunk, biopunk, steampunk; automated bodies in comics media
• Fictions of transformation across media: Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” Coppélia, The Nutcracker
• Fictions of male reproduction; parthenogenesis; auto-generation; cloning
• Mechanical bodies and televisual media: The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, Dark Angel, Aeon Flux; media and mechanization
• Mechanical bodies in dance; dancing machines; machine music; music and automatism; karaoke; Dance Dance Revolution
• Mechanical bodies and fitness; sports and automation
• Robots as themes and instruments in contemporary music: Daft Punk, Ladytron, Kraftwerk, Radiohead, Robyn; Auto-Tune
• Avatars; gaming bodies (bodies in games, players’ bodies); virtual automation; virtual companions; intimate operating systems: Her; Siri; artificial intelligence
• Humans and computers; computer automation; machine dependency; devices, appliances, watches, glasses; brain-computer interface
• Social media and automatism
• Robot, robotics, fembot, cyborg, cylon, clone, replicant; robots as “immigrants from the future” (The Economist)
• Anthropomorphized robots; robots and affect; robots and love; robots we love; robots we fear; human/robot hybrids; roboethics
• Donna Haraway: reading organisms and machines since “The Cyborg Manifesto”
• Gender and automation; automation and patriarchy; fantasies of automation; housewives and mechanization
• Femininity and living dolls; Mechanical Brides, Stepford Wives, Windup Girls
• Masculinity and living dolls; Lars and the Real Girl, My Living Doll, Metropolis
• Automation, capital, and labour; automation and exhaustion; robots and dirty human work; overwork and automation; automation and unemployment
• Bodies in industry; factory bodies; Taylorism; Fordism; factory girls, typewriter girls; modernism, modernity, Modern Times
• Automated monsters (Chucky); zombies and/as automated bodies; Frankenstein; bodies and/as weapons; automation and monstrosity
• Automatic writing; computer-generated poetry; hypnotism and performing bodies
• Animals and automation; robot animals; cinema and mechanical creatures; technologies of 3D animation
• Automobility, automaticity, bodies and cars; killer cars (Christine, Killdozer)
• Automated toys and other things; sex toys; future toys
• Talking to machines: everyday life and automated systems
• Machines without humans: self-parking cars, self-flying planes, drones, drone photography; killing machines
• Surveillance and security systems; facial recognition technology; NSA monitoring; bio-identification

Please forward either a 500-word abstract OR a completed paper (6000-8000 words, in MLA format) and a 50-word biographical statement to Marcelle Kosman (mkosman@ualberta.ca) and Cecily Devereux (cecily.devereux@ualberta.ca) by August 15, 2015. Final revisions to accepted papers will need to be completed by December 15, 2015.

ESC: English Studies in Canada is a quarterly journal of scholarship and criticism concerned with the study of literature and culture. Recent special issues include “Hysteria Manifest: Cultural Lives of a Great Disorder” (40.1: 2014), edited by Derritt Mason and Ela Pryzbylo); “The Global Animal” (39.1: 2013), edited by Karyn Ball and Melissa Haynes), and “Childhood and Its Discontents” (38:3-4: 2012), edited by Nat Hurley. For more information visit ESC Digital at www.arts.ualberta.ca/~esc ESC normally accepts black and white images, up to a limit of six per article. Contributors are responsible for providing image files in black and white with a resolution no less than… and for securing permissions in advance of publication. The journal’s style sheet is available at http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~esc/submit.php.

CFP Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities (Spec Issue) (3/1/16)

This sounds promising:

Call for Papers for Medical Humanities
Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities
http://scifimedhums.glasgow.ac.uk/journal-issue/

The BMJ Group journal Medical Humanities will be publishing a special issue: ‘Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities’.

Themes

We invite papers of broad interest to an international readership of medical humanities scholars and practising clinicians on the topic ‘Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities’.

Science fiction is a fertile ground for the imagining of biomedical advances. Technologies such as cloning, prosthetics, and rejuvenation are frequently encountered in science-fiction stories. Science fiction also offers alternative ideals of health and wellbeing, and imagines new forms of disease and suffering. The special issue seeks papers that explore issues of health, illness, and medicine in science-fiction narratives within a variety of media (written word, graphic novel, theatre, dance, film and television, etc.).

We are also particularly interested in articles that explore the biomedical ‘technoscientific imaginary’: the culturally-embedded imagining of futures enabled by technoscientific innovation. We especially welcome papers that explore science-fiction tropes, motifs, and narratives within medical and health-related discourses, practices, and institutions. The question – how does the biomedical technoscientific imaginary permeate the everyday and expert worlds of modern medicine and healthcare? – may be a useful prompt for potential authors.

Subject areas might include but are not limited to:

• clinicians as science-fiction writers
• representations of medicine, health, disability, and illness in science-fiction literature, cinema, and other media
• the use and misuse of science fiction in public engagement with biomedical science and technology
• utopian narratives of miraculous biomedical progress (and their counter-narratives)
• socio-political critique in medical science fiction (via cognitive estrangement, critical utopias, etc.)
• science fiction as stimulus to biomedical research and technology (e.g. science-fiction prototyping)
• science-fiction tropes, motifs and narratives in medical publicity, research announcements, promotional material, etc.
• the visual and material aesthetic of science fiction in medicine and healthcare settings

Publication

Up to 10 articles will be published in Medical Humanities in 2016.

All articles will be blind peer-reviewed according to the journal’s editorial policies. Final publication decisions will rest with the Editor-in-Chief, Professor Deborah Bowman.

Important Dates

Please submit your article no later than 1 March 2016

Submission Instructions

Articles for Medical Humanities should be a maximum of 5,000 words, and submitted via the journal’s website. Please choose the special issue ‘Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities’ during the submission process.

If you would like to discuss any aspect of your submission, including possible topics, or the possibility of presenting your work under the auspices of the Wellcome Trust funded project ‘Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities’, please contact the Guest Editor in the first instance:  Dr Gavin Miller (gavin.miller@glasgow.ac.uk)

Reading List: Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley

Three posts for the new year on suggested reading for Monster Studies. The first up is The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley (2003) edited by Esther Schor. The collection offers a complete look at Shelley's writings, and I learned a lot about her in reading the various essays.

The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley
Part of Cambridge Companions to Literature
EDITOR: Esther Schor
DATE PUBLISHED: January 2004
PaperbackISBN: 9780521007702

Well-known scholars review Mary Shelley's work in several contexts (literary history, aesthetic and literary culture, the legacies of her parents) and also analyze her most famous work-- Frankenstein. The contributors also examine Shelley as a biographer, cultural critic, and travel writer. The text is supplemented by a chronology, guide to further reading and select filmography.

Contents:

Chronology
Preface

Part I. 'The Author of Frankenstein':
1. Making a 'monster': an introduction to Frankenstein Anne K. Mellor
2. Frankenstein, Matilda, and the legacies of Godwin and Wollstonecraft Pamela Clemit
3. Frankenstein, feminism, and literary theory Diane Long Hoeveler
4. Frankenstein on Film Esther Schor
5. Frankenstein's futurity: from replicants to robotics Jay Clayton

Part II. Fictions and Myths:
6. Valperga Stuart Curran
7. The last man Kari E. Lokke
8. Historical novelist Deidre Lynch
9. Falkner and other fictions Kate Ferguson Ellis
10. Stories for the Keepsake Charlotte Sussman
11. Proserpine and Midas Judith Pascoe

Part III. Professional Personae:
12. Mary Shelley, editor Susan J. Wolfson
13. Letters: the public/private self Betty T. Bennett
14. Mary Shelley as biographer Greg Kucich
15. Mary Shelley's travel writing Jeanne Moskal
16. Mary Shelley as cultural critic Timothy Morton

Further reading
Selected filmography.

Madame Frankenstein Preview

Image Comics has posted the first 7 pages of the recent comic book series Madame Frankenstein online. Details at http://imagecomics.tumblr.com/post/106534692041/jazz-age-glamour-and-gothic-horror-in-madame. The series presents the resurrection of a 1920s-era woman as a monster and will be available in a collected edition come March 2015.

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.

Monster (Super)Heroes and (Super)Villains

Here's a mixed group of shows featuring monsters as superhero-like heroes and villains. Details on all five shows can be found on their respective Wikipedia pages.

Frankenstein's Cat!

Here's a fun one I came across last summer. Its very much in the vein of Beetlejuice with Nine, the eponymous Frankenstein's Cat, providing adventure for his human playmate, Lottie. The series, now out on DVD,  is based on a picture book by Curtis Jobling.

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.

Frankenstein Jr.

Another classic Hanna-Barbara series. Again, like Frankenstein, Milton, and Speed Buggy, the robot known as Frankenstein Jr. (voiced by Ted Cassidy) is a created being and, like Godzilla and The King Kong Show, has a boy companion.




Frankenstein Jr. seems also a bit inspired by another series from the 1960s, Gigantor, as revealed below:

Speed Buggy?

Here's another example of a created being, perhaps (?) inspired also by Frankenstein.

Milton the Monster?

Here's a good version of Frankenstein's Monster. I'm not familiar with this series at all, so I will try to post further on it in the future. The first clip is apparently an early opening for the series and includes Milton's origin. The second one must be later in the series' run and focuses on other characters of the show.