Global Frankenstein: Mary Shelley, Ghosts and Hyperspace – New Published Chapter! – Kirstin Mills Art, Illustration, Academic Research and Teaching

Global Frankenstein, Palgrave, Carol Davison, Marie Mulvey Roberts, Gothic Literature, Science Fiction Studies

Global Frankenstein: Mary Shelley, Ghosts and Hyperspace – New Published Chapter!

December 9, 2018 In Academic Research All Blog Posts News, Announcements & Events

I’m very excited to announce the release of a wonderful new book on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which includes 17 chapters by international scholars (including my own) in celebration of Frankenstein‘s 200th anniversary! Global Frankenstein, edited by Carol Margaret Davison and Marie Mulvey-Roberts is published this month by Palgrave Macmillan. It has been called a “welcome collection of articles—about Frankenstein and science and technology, medicine and monstrosity, the spectacular and the visual…and the future—by a new generation of scholars,” which “brings the story up to date by viewing it from the perspectives, and through the concerns, of today. It’s a very suitable, and suitably global, 200th birthday celebration” (Professor Sir Christopher Frayling, author of Frankenstein: The First Two Hundred Years [2017]).

My chapter is entitled “Frankenstein in Hyperspace: The Gothic Return of Digital Technologies to the Origins of Virtual Space in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” It explores the uncanny return to elements of Mary Shelley’s context brought on by the adaptation of her famous novel into new digital forms, where these technologies evoke a spectral form of reading, both embodied and disembodied, that reflects the multi-dimensional layers of space, consciousness and the supernatural that appear in both Shelley’s novel, and its wider contemporary context of gothic literature and scientific investigations of the supernatural and the sciences of the mind.

Global Frankenstein, Kirstin Mills, Gothic Literature, Nineteenth Century Literature, Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, Hyperspace, Virtual Reality, Ghosts, Death, Supernatural, Digital Books, Digital Adaptation,, Digital Gothic, Palgrave, Carol Davison, Marie Mulvey Roberts, Science Fiction Studies

Monstrously excited to be holding this book in the flesh!

Chapter Abstract:

“The virtual, hypertextual spaces of twenty-first-century interactive digital media are commonly considered to be uniquely modern phenomena. Adaptations of classic texts into this format are therefore seen as radical departures from the original texts and the experience of reading them. This chapter proposes, however, that the adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein into the new form of the interactive ‘digital book’ paradoxically marks a return to its central—yet often overlooked—concerns with higher-dimensional (hyper-)space, which Shelley explored both thematically and formally, and which were also involved in nineteenth-century approaches to reading. As well as examining these early forms of virtual space, this chapter proposes that the ‘digital book’ is itself an inherently gothic form that reveals the uncanny potential of new media in the twenty-first century.”

I’m honoured to have been included in this volume of excellent essays, which each approach Mary Shelley’s classic novel from a wide range of exciting angles, including science and surgery, gender and class, film and adaptation, comics and gaming, and more. View the whole collection, and see the wonderful array of contemporary scholarship on this classic novel below:

Publication Details:

Global Frankenstein by Carol Davison and Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Palgrave MacMillan. Gothic studies, science fiction studies, literature.

‘Frankenstein in Hyperspace: The Gothic Return of Digital Technologies to the Origins of Virtual Space in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.’ Global Frankenstein. Ed. Carol Margaret Davison and Marie Mulvey-Roberts. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 265-281. [Preview & Buy on Publisher’s Website]