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).

CFP Reimagining the Victorians (3/1/21; Spec Issue of Victorians Institute Journal)

Reimagining the Victorians

https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2020/11/02/reimagining-the-victorians

deadline for submissions:
March 1, 2021


full name / name of organization:
Victorians Institute Journal


contact email:
vij@mtsu.edu




Special Issue of Victorians Institute Journal:

Reimagining the Victorians

   The success of the recent movie, The Personal History of David Copperfield (2020), featuring a racially diverse cast, has renewed the discussion of how we, in the twenty-first century, have re-imagined the nineteenth century and its culture through our adaptation and remediation of Edwardian and Victorian texts and figures. Across media, for example, Sherlock Holmes may be found stalking the streets of London in both period costume and modern dress (sometimes with a newly invented younger sister), while the multi-talented Elizabeth Bennett can be re-discovered (a) demurely preparing for a ball, (b) quaffing wine and chain-smoking as Bridget Jones, (c) dancing wildly in a Bollywood production number, and even (d) fiercely battling zombies. Carson the butler silently patrols the halls of Downton Abbey exuding decorum, while Andrew Lloyd Webber brings all the sensationalism of The Woman in White to a melodically thrilling, faux-operatic musical, and the versatile Johnny Depp warbles as the Demon of Fleet Street in the horror-musical Sweeney Todd and cavorts as the Mad Hatter in the live-action/animated version of Alice in Wonderland. Royal biography becomes soap opera in Victoria, royally entertaining and addictive, if not always historically accurate, while in the latest adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, we are not only transported into the boundlessness of a child’s imagination but also into a grim post-WWII era. Ellen Ternan, Euphemia Gray, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood have had their lives transformed into biopics (The Silent Woman, Effie Gray, The Desperate Romantics), while Jonathan Whicher, who was fictionalized by both Dickens and Wilkie Collins, was returned to reality and grounded in a popular biography, a biography that subsequently was adapted into a film that launched Whicher back into a series of fictional adventures, transforming him once again into the figure of super detective.  The genre-bending list of sequels, prequels, and spinoffs is almost endless—Mr. Rochester, Mr. Dick, Mr. Timothy, Death and Mr. Pickwick, Olivia Twist, Dodger, Drood, The Last Dickens, Penny Dreadful, Ripper Street, Becoming Jane Eyre, Alice I Have Been, and so on. To make sense of these diverse adaptations, Victorians Institute Journal invites submissions for a special issue featuring essays examining our twenty-first century perspective of the long nineteenth century. Essays might focus on twenty-first century novels (original fiction as well as sequels, prequels, and adaptations of canonical works), films, musicals and stage productions, TV series, graphic novels, fan fiction, video games, and biographical fiction. Papers should be 5000-8000 words in length and follow the Chicago Manual of Style. Submissions (in Microsoft Word) and inquiries should be emailed to the editors (Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox) at vij@mtsu.edu.  Submissions must be received by March 1, 2021.

Last updated November 4, 2020

CFP Penny Dreadful Collection (expired)

Just came across this today. Sorry to have missed it earlier. I wish the organizers good luck in compiling the collection.


Penny Dreadful; Gothic Reimagining and Neo-Victorianism in Modern Television
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2017/03/28/penny-dreadful-gothic-reimagining-and-neo-victorianism-in-modern-television

deadline for submissions: May 15, 2017

full name / name of organization: J. Greenaway/ S. Reid

contact email: j.greenaway@mmu.ac.uk


Penny Dreadful (2014-2016) has become one of the most critical well-regarded shows of the post-millennial Gothic television revival, drawing explicitly on classic tropes, texts and characters throughout its three-season run. However, despite the show’s critical success and cult following, a substantive academic examination of the show has yet to be undertaken.


This edited collection seeks to address the current lack within Gothic studies scholarship, and situate Penny Dreadful as a key contemporary Gothic television text. This collection will seek to trace the link between the continued expansion of Gothic television, alongside the popular engagement with Neo-Victorianism. In addition, the collection seeks to examine notions around the aesthetic importance of contemporary Gothic that become particularly prominent against the narrative re-imaginings that occur within Penny Dreadful. This collection explores exactly where Gothic resides within this reflexive, hybridized and intertextual work; in the bodies, the stories, the history, the styling, or somewhere else entirely?



Possible contributions could include, but are no means limited to the following:

• Gothic adaptation and/or appropriation?
• Pastiche and parody and Gothic aesthetics
• ‘Global Gothic’ in the sense of its commercialisation
• Neo-Victorianism (styling, politics, economics); as well as explorations of the impact of ‘historicizing’ Gothic
• Representation of gender within the text, specifically female monstrosity
• The Post/Colonial context, as well racialized characterisation and presentation
• The reworking/restyling of monsters in contemporary Gothic
• Consideration of a ‘Romance’ aesthetic and how this alters conceptions of ‘Gothic’ texts and the influence of ‘romantic’ themes/styles in contemporary Gothic

What the proposal should include:

An extended abstract of 500 words (for a 6,000-word chapter) including a proposed chapter title, a clear theoretical approach and reference to some relevant sources.

Please also provide your contact information, institutional affiliation, and a short biography.

Abstracts should be sent as a word document attachment to j.greenaway@mmu.ac.uk or stephanie.m.reid@stu.mmu.ac.uk by no later than May 15th 2017 with the subject line, “Penny Dreadful Abstract Submission.”


Last updated March 28, 2017