Re-visioning Frankenstein: Illustrative, Pictorial, and Digital Adaptations

This panel will address illustrative, pictorial, and digital treatments and adaptations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The novel has a 195-year history of illustration and depiction in a wide range of visual arts, media, and technologies—from the 1823 cover of Richard Brinsley Peake’s play Presumption to the first issue of the comic series Mary Shelley, Monster Hunter (February 2019). The novel’s “hyperadaptability” in visual form, to adopt Dennis Perry’s term, extends to a wide range of modes. I welcome proposals that are theoretically and historically mindful of the process of adaptation and trans-literation in considering visual versions of Frankenstein in a diverse range of forms: book illustration, painting, movies, television, digital and internet treatments, video games, children’s picture books, cartoons and caricatures, as well as in comic books, graphic novels, and manga. Papers should balance close with critical, cultural, and historical readings, while theorizing the issues that attend the aesthetic process of revisioning and reviving the form and narrative of Shelley’s novel. Please send proposals of no more than 300 words to chris.koenig.woodyard@utoronto.ca by January 10, 2020.