Books by Megen de Bruin-Molé
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9781786836908, 2021
From Outbreak to The Walking Dead, apocalyptic narratives of infection, contagion and global pand... more From Outbreak to The Walking Dead, apocalyptic narratives of infection, contagion and global pandemic are an inescapable part of twenty-first-century popular culture. Yet these fears and fantasies are too virulent to be simply quarantined within fictional texts; vocabulary and metaphors from outbreak narratives have now infiltrated how news media, policymakers, and the general public view the real world and the people within it. In an age where fact and fiction seem increasingly difficult to separate, contagious bodies (and the discourses that contain them) continually blur established boundaries between real and unreal, legitimacy and frivolity, science and the supernatural. Where previous scholarly work has examined the spread of epidemic realities in horror fiction, the essays in this collection also consider how epidemic fantasies and fears influence reality. Bringing scholarship from cultural and media studies into conversation with scholarship from the medical humanities and social sciences, this collection aims to give readers a fuller picture of the viropolitics of contagious bodies in contemporary global culture.
The bestselling genre of Frankenfiction sees classic literature turned into commercial narratives... more The bestselling genre of Frankenfiction sees classic literature turned into commercial narratives invaded by zombies, vampires, werewolves, and other fantastical monsters. Too engaged with tradition for some and not traditional enough for others, these 'monster mashups' are often criticized as a sign of the artistic and moral degeneration of contemporary culture. These hybrid creations are the 'monsters' of our age, lurking at the limits of responsible consumption and acceptable appropriation.
This book explores the boundaries and connections between contemporary remix and related modes, including adaptation, parody, the Gothic, Romanticism, and postmodernism. Taking a multimedia approach, case studies range from novels like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club series, to television programmes such as Penny Dreadful, to popular visual artworks like Kevin J. Weir's Flux Machine GIFs. Megen de Bruin-Molé uses these monstrous and liminal works to show how the thrill of transgression has been contained within safe and familiar formats, resulting in the mashups that dominate Western popular culture.
Articles by Megen de Bruin-Molé
Embodying Contagion, 2021
FROM OUTBREAK to The Walking Dead, apocalyptic narratives of infection, contagion and global pand... more FROM OUTBREAK to The Walking Dead, apocalyptic narratives of infection, contagion and global pandemic are an inescapable part of post-millennial popular culture. Yet these fears and fantasies are too
virulent to simply be quarantined within fictional texts; vocabulary and metaphors from outbreak narratives have infiltrated how news media, policymakers and the general public view the world and the people within it. Indeed, popular cultural imaginations of outbreaks seem to have played an important role in responses to the coronavirus outbreak of 2020. In 2008, Priscilla Wald outlined the history of the ‘outbreak narrative’, emphasising the ways in which the politics of fictions and the fictions of politics have always been intertwined. Wald traces con- tagion from its early uses in the fourteenth century, where it literally meant ‘to touch together’, connoting dangerous or corrupting ideas and attitudes: ‘Revolutionary ideas were contagious, as were heretical beliefs and practices’. In contemporary contexts, we find narratives in which humans’ ‘futile efforts to defend themselves against the threat of illness in the daily interactions’ are ‘made global by contemporary transporta- tion and commerce’. In all instances, contagion serves as ‘a principle of classification that displayed the rationale of social organization and was, therefore, the force that bound people to the relationships that consti- tuted the terms of their existence’.
Embodying Contagion, 2021
The zombie is an incredibly versatile, and thus incredibly varied, symbol. In this chapter, I wan... more The zombie is an incredibly versatile, and thus incredibly varied, symbol. In this chapter, I want to try to pin down this very broad, very popular figure in the context of contagion and epidemic anxiety, and examine whether our general assumptions about the zombie, as our culture’s ‘only modern myth’, are still accurate in practice. How has the zombie been understood in a popular and political context, and how is it commonly understood today? In particular, how has our changing understanding of the politics of illness, individual autonomy and belong- ing impacted how we depict the zombie? To answer this question while still attempting to acknowledge the zombie’s incredible versatility, in this chapter I identify three branches of contemporary zombie fiction across a variety of popular media.
The Cambridge History of the Gothic: Gothic in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, 2021
What are the implications of the rapid rise in remixed Gothic, both for remix practices and for t... more What are the implications of the rapid rise in remixed Gothic, both for remix practices and for the Gothic mode? From the turn of the twenty-first century, Gothic media have reached unprecedented levels of commercialisation and, as a result, have begun to proliferate in new and interesting ways. Many critics have noted that Gothic texts (and their commemorative adaptations) often seem to cluster around the turn of each century, emerging ‘as particularly potent and popular at times of both crisis in and shifting intensifications of capital and power’. For Anthony Mandal, Gothic fiction’s position on a ‘liminal boundary between authenticity and counterfeit, in a mode whose obsession with the past belies its thoroughly modern provenance, is particularly salient in relation to today’s “remix” culture, which has been enabled by a digital technology that haunts and is haunted by its textual predecessors’. In the age of remix culture, the genre’s obsession with appropriation and repetition, its tendencies towards fakery and self-cannibalism, and its embrace by and of commercial culture all converge into one big, Gothic monster.
The Routledge Handbook of Remix Studies and Digital Humanitie, 2021
This chapter begins with the question: Is remix a monster, and digital humanities the means throu... more This chapter begins with the question: Is remix a monster, and digital humanities the means through which it is destined to bring down the old-fashioned, exclusionary, and hierarchical modes of humanities past? Using the metaphor of Frankenstein and his creature, I will stitch together theories of monstrosity and transgression from both literary and media studies to explore this question. The answer, I argue, is that the transgressive potential of remix and the digital humanities lies less in the form of these disciplines, and more in their practice: how they are allowed to intersect, evolve, and escape their traditional (anti)humanist foundations.
Transmedia Cultures: A Companion, 2021
Transmedia storytelling can be a powerful tool for representing and narrativizing our world, but ... more Transmedia storytelling can be a powerful tool for representing and narrativizing our world, but also for building a better, more ethical present. In particular, transmedia’s digital lens can reveal important new possibilities, particularly when approached through a posthumanist perspective. When we think of ‘the posthuman’ we might initially envision cyborgs, aliens, and monsters, but the theoretical framework of critical posthumanism takes a different approach to this term. As Stefan Herbrechter points out in the Posthuman Glossary, the ‘post’ in posthumanism on the one hand “signifies a desire or indeed a need to somehow go beyond humanism (or the human), while on the other hand, since the post- also necessarily repeats what it prefixes, it displays an awareness that neither humanism nor the human can in fact be overcome in any straightforward dialectical or historical fashion (for example, in the sense: after the human, the posthuman)” (Herbrechter 2018: 94). As a result of this double vision, looking forward and back at the same time, acts of critical posthumanist imagining remain firmly grounded in the present moment. In Herbrechter’s words, a critical posthumanism “functions more like an anamnesis and a rewriting of the human and humanism’ than an erasure, explicitly resisting transhumanist or apocalyptic visions of the future through which humans might “‘argue themselves out of the picture’ precisely at a time when climate change caused by the impact of human civilisation (cf. Anthropocene) calls for urgent and responsible, human action” (Herbrechter 2018: 95). David Blandy’s 2019 exhibition The World After offers an excellent illustration of the possibilities of posthumanist transmedia for imagining a world outside ourselves, and beyond the dystopian capitalist realities of the contemporary Anthropocene.
The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication, 2020
Though they have often been marginal, female video game characters have been present, even playab... more Though they have often been marginal, female video game characters have been present, even playable, from the early days of the industry. From Metroid’s Samus Aran (1986) to Lara Croft (1996) to Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn (2017), this entry tracks the history of women heroes in video games, with a focus on titles where the player character is female. Broadly speaking, the representation of women in video games tends to reflect the gender politics and assumptions of the gaming industry as a whole. Early games regularly hypersexualize their female protagonists, for the benefit of an assumed male, heterosexual audience. From the 2000s, as identity politics go mainstream and the gaming industry itself becomes bigger and more diversified, we see a rise in customization: the player is able to choose their gender, race, body type, and—on rarer occasions—sexuality. And in more recent years, with the rise of the indie games industry, complex and powerful women are more frequently represented, both on screen and off, as capable of carrying a successful franchise. Despite the increasingly nuanced and visible depiction of women heroes in video games, however, there is still much to be done in terms of the frequency, intersectionality, and paratextual framing of these portrayals.
Since its acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2014, Disney has been praised for its active marketing of S... more Since its acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2014, Disney has been praised for its active marketing of Star Wars to fans of all backgrounds, across a variety of platforms. Disney's strategy places the Star Wars films front and center, but relies on a multitude of transmedia texts and paratexts to supplement this "core" narrative. These supplemental texts often attempt to diversify the core fanbase, potentially locating them within a practice Kristen J. Warner calls " plastic representation ". Plastic representation offers marginalized audiences "culturally specific contextual" versions of a franchise's more homogenous mainstream pillars. As a case study, I take the girl-focused Forces of Destiny YouTube series and toy line (2017–2018). This article examines the tensions between how Forces of Destiny is presented by Disney and how it has been received by fans and consumers, considering how it fits into the broader context of Star Wars transmedia, commodity activism, and paratextual erasure.
This article uses fictional depictions of Mary Shelley as the 'mother' of sf to explore how gende... more This article uses fictional depictions of Mary Shelley as the 'mother' of sf to explore how gendered images of the Romantic genius continue to influence our perception of women in genre fiction. The first part of the article introduces the concept of the Romantic authorship, and reviews Shelley's legacy as the mother of sf. The second part of the article analyses Shelley's fictionalised appearances on-screen: in film, television, and new media, from 1935 to the present day. This analysis demonstrates that even in fictions depicting Shelley as an author in her own right, she is still marked by a gendered understanding of how women should function creatively. The way female authors are fictionalised (as opposed to how they are depicted in biographical or academic texts) reflects our expectations of women in the creative industries more broadly.
Deletion, 2018
With its fetishization of social hierarchies, at first blush mannerpunk, more commonly known as “... more With its fetishization of social hierarchies, at first blush mannerpunk, more commonly known as “fantasy of manners” fiction, seems incompatible with a punk aesthetic. One online reviewer writes: “Basically, if you can stick ‘Jane Austen meets X’ in front of your story proposal, it’s got a good chance of being Mannerpunk” (Romano, 2016). Grouping her writings together with the wildly diverse work of Gail Carriger, Cherie Priest, and Sherwood Smith, M.K. Hobson identifies the genre as “[p]aranormal romantic historical fantasy tinged with the Victorian” (Hobson, 2009). Although many mannerpunk novels contain little romance, melodrama, or physical description (Priest’s work is a key example), in the comments Sherwood Smith suggests that Hobson is in fact “describing […] what was called Mannerpunk ten years ago” (Hobson, 2009).
Given the incredibly varied body of texts labelled “mannerpunk”, it would be unfair to claim any description of the genre is definitive. In fact the very diversity of mannerpunk, and the dismissive way this label is often used by authors and critics, raises some interesting questions. From Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint (1987) to Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series (2006–2016), this essay briefly explores how mannerpunk plays with the tropes of speculative punk. Can a literature grounded in protocols, etiquette, and social hierarchies even be “punk”? If so, what is it punking?
Assuming Gender, 2017
This special issue of Assuming Gender seeks to examine and problematise the relationship between ... more This special issue of Assuming Gender seeks to examine and problematise the relationship between consumer culture and gender—but what does it mean to be a ‘consumer’ of gender, or a gendered consumer? More than ever before, we define ourselves through the things we buy, and the ways in which we buy them. This theoretically gives us a certain degree of agency, transforming the act of buying (or refusing to buy) into a political or ideological statement. As many scholars have argued in recent years, however, the use of considering the ‘individual consumer’ an autonomous political entity is limited. Consumer identity is intersectional and highly complex, and must be regarded as a nexus of competing and often contradictory influences.
Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling, 2017
Since its acquisition by Disney in 2012, the Star Wars franchise has been widely praised for its ... more Since its acquisition by Disney in 2012, the Star Wars franchise has been widely praised for its feminism. New heroes such as Jyn Erso and Rey have been hailed as feminist triumphs for Star Wars and mainstream entertainment more broadly. New characters aimed at a new generation of fans, like Rebels’s pink-clad fighter-cum-artist Sabine Wren, and new novels devoted to characters like Leia Organa and Ahsoka Tano (from The Clone Wars), are often cited as part of a growing commitment to female characters and to feminism by association. Likewise, the marketing force of Star Wars can now be felt strongly in female-targeted sectors (makeup, fashion, dolls). Does all of this mean, as one reviewer put it, that Star Wars “finally awakens to a feminist world”?
Neo-Victorian Humour: Comic Subversions and Unlaughter in Contemporary Historical Re-Visions, Feb 2017
This article situates the novel-as-mashup, first popularised by Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Pr... more This article situates the novel-as-mashup, first popularised by Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), within twenty-first-century neo-Victorianism. Using several key examples of these mashup texts, it embarks on a discussion of postmodernism’s ironic nostalgia, exploring the limits of such irony through questions of hermeneutics and ethics that are currently relevant in the field of neo-Victorian studies. Is it possible to find any stable meaning (or meaningful irony) in a text that is made up of other texts? What happens when texts are wilfully or inadvertently misread, and how do we approach instances where misreading causes harm, or reproduces problematic ideologies? Can texts that do not use the past seriously still be ironic, and if not, what does this mean for commercial, parodical genres like the novel-as-mashup?
Featured Blog Posts (click title for link) by Megen de Bruin-Molé
Initial similarities aside Penny Dreadful has less in common with The League of Extraordinary Gen... more Initial similarities aside Penny Dreadful has less in common with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen than you might think. Most of these accusations of plagiarism ignore the fact the Moore was also influenced by mashup texts like The Other Log of Phileas Fogg (1973), and, ironically, was himself accused of plagiarising Kim Newman’s novel Anno Dracula (1992) back when The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was first published. Most accusations of plagiarism directed at Penny Dreadful also don’t consider that both the monster mashup and the anti-hero team were around long before either Penny Dreadful or The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Now, as it finishes its second season and sets itself up for another, Penny Dreadful has clearly made a name for itself in its own right. How, if at all, does it relate to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and to what extent is it worth comparing the two texts?
Sexiness aside, if we stick to bare facts Victoria is no more or less informative or historically... more Sexiness aside, if we stick to bare facts Victoria is no more or less informative or historically accurate than the highly acclaimed biopic Lincoln (2012). But because the latter is ‘dignified’ in its emotion rather than giddy or indulgent, it is deemed superior. Why should it enrage viewers like Delingpole if a piece of historical fiction chooses to view its object from a sexual and emotional perspective, rather than a cerebral or rational one? The answer, of course, is that these perspectives are not assigned equal levels of value in contemporary culture. The rational is privileged above the emotional, just as other traditionally masculine traits are still praised over traditionally feminine ones. By focusing on sex and sentiment rather than traditionally interpreted historical evidence, the show doesn’t just turn off male viewers, Delingpole argues, it also betrays the objective truth of history, which is based not on sentiment but on cold, hard facts.
Victoria is neo-Victorian fiction at its purest, engaging with and under-writing our perception of the era’s most recognisable figure, who has already been sold to us in a thousand forms. It even employs all the stereotypical tools of the neo-Victorian novel to do so.
The Rogue One teaser itself already contains a number of references to obscure fan favourites fro... more The Rogue One teaser itself already contains a number of references to obscure fan favourites from the original trilogy, like Mon Mothma or the Gonk droid. This suggests that the film, like The Force Awakens, will do its best not to alienate its hardcore fanbase. In addition to downplaying the stories told off the big screen, however, the idea that Rogue One will be a completely new type of Star Wars story ignores the ways in which the film’s entire approach to the Star Wars galaxy has actually been replicated many times over in fan culture.
What follows is part one of a spoiler-free discussion of The Force Awakens (the new Star Wars mov... more What follows is part one of a spoiler-free discussion of The Force Awakens (the new Star Wars movie), and its cultural context in science fiction, fandom, and nostalgia culture. It aims to unpack a few common criticisms of the film, and situates my own reflections of Star Wars, Episode VII: The Force Awakens among them. This is not meant to be an apologist analysis of the film, but many of the current critiques of the film have been problematic in their own right.
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Books by Megen de Bruin-Molé
This book explores the boundaries and connections between contemporary remix and related modes, including adaptation, parody, the Gothic, Romanticism, and postmodernism. Taking a multimedia approach, case studies range from novels like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club series, to television programmes such as Penny Dreadful, to popular visual artworks like Kevin J. Weir's Flux Machine GIFs. Megen de Bruin-Molé uses these monstrous and liminal works to show how the thrill of transgression has been contained within safe and familiar formats, resulting in the mashups that dominate Western popular culture.
Articles by Megen de Bruin-Molé
virulent to simply be quarantined within fictional texts; vocabulary and metaphors from outbreak narratives have infiltrated how news media, policymakers and the general public view the world and the people within it. Indeed, popular cultural imaginations of outbreaks seem to have played an important role in responses to the coronavirus outbreak of 2020. In 2008, Priscilla Wald outlined the history of the ‘outbreak narrative’, emphasising the ways in which the politics of fictions and the fictions of politics have always been intertwined. Wald traces con- tagion from its early uses in the fourteenth century, where it literally meant ‘to touch together’, connoting dangerous or corrupting ideas and attitudes: ‘Revolutionary ideas were contagious, as were heretical beliefs and practices’. In contemporary contexts, we find narratives in which humans’ ‘futile efforts to defend themselves against the threat of illness in the daily interactions’ are ‘made global by contemporary transporta- tion and commerce’. In all instances, contagion serves as ‘a principle of classification that displayed the rationale of social organization and was, therefore, the force that bound people to the relationships that consti- tuted the terms of their existence’.
Given the incredibly varied body of texts labelled “mannerpunk”, it would be unfair to claim any description of the genre is definitive. In fact the very diversity of mannerpunk, and the dismissive way this label is often used by authors and critics, raises some interesting questions. From Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint (1987) to Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series (2006–2016), this essay briefly explores how mannerpunk plays with the tropes of speculative punk. Can a literature grounded in protocols, etiquette, and social hierarchies even be “punk”? If so, what is it punking?
Featured Blog Posts (click title for link) by Megen de Bruin-Molé
Victoria is neo-Victorian fiction at its purest, engaging with and under-writing our perception of the era’s most recognisable figure, who has already been sold to us in a thousand forms. It even employs all the stereotypical tools of the neo-Victorian novel to do so.
This book explores the boundaries and connections between contemporary remix and related modes, including adaptation, parody, the Gothic, Romanticism, and postmodernism. Taking a multimedia approach, case studies range from novels like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club series, to television programmes such as Penny Dreadful, to popular visual artworks like Kevin J. Weir's Flux Machine GIFs. Megen de Bruin-Molé uses these monstrous and liminal works to show how the thrill of transgression has been contained within safe and familiar formats, resulting in the mashups that dominate Western popular culture.
virulent to simply be quarantined within fictional texts; vocabulary and metaphors from outbreak narratives have infiltrated how news media, policymakers and the general public view the world and the people within it. Indeed, popular cultural imaginations of outbreaks seem to have played an important role in responses to the coronavirus outbreak of 2020. In 2008, Priscilla Wald outlined the history of the ‘outbreak narrative’, emphasising the ways in which the politics of fictions and the fictions of politics have always been intertwined. Wald traces con- tagion from its early uses in the fourteenth century, where it literally meant ‘to touch together’, connoting dangerous or corrupting ideas and attitudes: ‘Revolutionary ideas were contagious, as were heretical beliefs and practices’. In contemporary contexts, we find narratives in which humans’ ‘futile efforts to defend themselves against the threat of illness in the daily interactions’ are ‘made global by contemporary transporta- tion and commerce’. In all instances, contagion serves as ‘a principle of classification that displayed the rationale of social organization and was, therefore, the force that bound people to the relationships that consti- tuted the terms of their existence’.
Given the incredibly varied body of texts labelled “mannerpunk”, it would be unfair to claim any description of the genre is definitive. In fact the very diversity of mannerpunk, and the dismissive way this label is often used by authors and critics, raises some interesting questions. From Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint (1987) to Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series (2006–2016), this essay briefly explores how mannerpunk plays with the tropes of speculative punk. Can a literature grounded in protocols, etiquette, and social hierarchies even be “punk”? If so, what is it punking?
Victoria is neo-Victorian fiction at its purest, engaging with and under-writing our perception of the era’s most recognisable figure, who has already been sold to us in a thousand forms. It even employs all the stereotypical tools of the neo-Victorian novel to do so.
With all this in mind, I’m going to take a two-pronged approach to these final episodes, and to the season as a whole. First, I will look briefly at the show’s portrayal of faith and religion. Then I’ll explore my feelings about the show’s conclusion, through its intertextual relationships with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).
Enter artist Colin Batty, whose most 2014 project ‘Meet the Family’ appropriated over a hundred cabinet cards – postcard-style portraits popular from the late nineteenth century, circa 1870, to the end of the first World War. Batty hand-painted each cabinet card in his collection to include Gothic monsters, aliens, and various other figures from popular culture. No Photoshop necessary. The physical cabinet cards are currently held by the Peculiarium Gallery in Portland, Oregon (where you can still buy some of them from the gallery’s website). Originally, they were purchased in bulk from a thrift store.
Each zombie character in these stories is a potential disease vector, but each manages to manage their illness and make a valuable contribution to human society. Rather than serving as a ritualistic demarcation between the self or nation and the monstrous other, these fantastical monsters instead ‘dramatise the profound senses of corporeal vulnerability that pervade modern society, most manifestly when commodification invades new spheres of social life’. Rather than dehumanising the other outside of the community, in these narratives the horror is directed inward, to the twin ‘monsters’ of modernity that cannot be escaped, destroyed, or ignored, and must be embraced and ethically managed: capitalism and consumerism.
Mary Shelley’s recollection of her moment of inspiration for Frankenstein is every bit as gothic as the immortal scene of unnatural creation found within the pages of the novel itself. When it appeared in 1818, Shelley’s debut novel was a sensation, leading reviewers both to celebrate it as a work of ‘originality’ and ‘extreme interest’ and to denounce it as ‘an uncouth story, in the taste of the German novelists, trenching in some degree on delicacy, setting probability at defiance’. The germ of this gothic tale is to be found in an evening of reading French ghost stories by the Byron–Shelley circle, who were sojourning during the summer of 1816 in the Villa Diodati near Generva. So entertained were the companions that they agreed to a ghost-story competition of their own. While Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and John Polidori conjured their own quite chilling spectres, they were eclipsed by the dark and brooding tale written by Percy’s 18-year-old mistress, Mary Godwin, which has gained a monumental, unnatural life of its own over the past two centuries.
To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the novel’s composition this June, we are delighted to offer another innovation of the BookTalk formula: a screening of Universal Pictures’ iconic 1931 film adaptation of the novel, directed by James Whale. Unlike the articulate and philosophical Creature of the novel, Boris Karloff’s monster is a mute, shambling being that is by turns destructive and sympathetic. More than any other adaptation—perhaps even more than the novel—it is this version of the story that dominates our popular consciousness today, inspiring numerous later adaptations and countless Halloween costumes.
As well as the screening, this evening’s BookTalk will feature four speakers who explore a number of different aspects of the Frankenstein myth:
Dr Anthony Mandal (Cardiff University), will introduce the screening by briefly talking about the novel’s composition and the film’s history.
Following the screening (and a short break), Dr Maximilaan van Woudenberg (Sheridan College, Canada) will discuss the curious history of the ghost stories that inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein.
Dr Lisa Stead (University of Exeter) will turn to the film, and how it fits in with genre, audiences and the Hollywood studio system of the 1930s.
Finally, Megen de Bruin-Molé (Cardiff University) will explore the legacy of Frankenstein, which continues to haunt popular literature and media to the present day.
The main event (6.30pm) will be preceded by a reception with tea, coffee and biscuits at 6pm in Cardiff University’s School of Optometry and Vision Sciences, Maindy Road, Cardiff CF24 4HQ. This event is jointly hosted with the Cardiff Romanticism and Eighteenth-Century Seminar.
In Penny Dreadful (and similar popular narratives), reimagined nineteenth-century monsters once again redefine the parameters of the monstrous, but they deliver less than they promise in the arena of identity politics. Showrunner John Logan has claimed that the show is an ‘exciting way to play with the central duality of what it is to be man, what it is to be a monster, what it is to be woman’. For Logan, the experience of monstrosity is also strongly linked to his own experience as a gay man. This perspective on monstrosity shows strongly in the show, which takes many opportunities to comment on queer identity, visualise the queer experience, and valorise difference more generally. Ultimately, however, despite its noble goals, Penny Dreadful uses monstrosity (and fantastical monsters) in a way that constructs a false sense of diversity, disturbance, and change. In its attempts to represent ‘everyone’, it instead shuts out all but the privileged minority it represents on-screen.
In the twenty-first century, the monster has lost some of its transgressive power and transpersonal significance. Taking Showtime’s television series Penny Dreadful (2014-present) as a case study, this paper illustrates why monstrous bodies no longer equal transgression – especially when it comes to the monsters of the past. It takes the right bodies, interacting in the right way, to reclaim the monster as a symbol of progressive identity politics. In Penny Dreadful (and similar popular narratives), reimagined nineteenth-century monsters once again redefine the parameters of the monstrous, but they deliver less than they promise in the arena of identity politics. Penny Dreadful ultimately uses the past (and its fantastical monsters) to subvert diversity, disturbance, and change. In its attempts to represent ‘everyone’, it instead shuts out all but the privileged minority it represents on-screen.
The impulse to move ‘beyond’ the classical humanism and humanities potentially creates a number of problems. How can we imagine something completely outside the human, when our entire experience is framed in human terms? And how do we safeguard against creating either a dangerously narrow or a uselessly broad definition of the human in our attempts to outline its opposite? Using a past that is technically both unalterable and behind us to move forward is a complicated endeavour, particularly in a time so obsessed with declaring that past dead and buried. Naturally resistant to such binary conceptualisations (human/inhuman, present/past, etc.), monster mashups project present-day multiplicities of identity and history onto the more stable fictions of the past. They create wilfully ‘false’ ruptures in history and subtly incorporate those ruptures into public memory, allowing readers to actively view and shape present perspectives through the lens of past ones.
This paper explores how the creation and inversion of ironic distance from the material traces of the past complicates readings of historical fiction in the twenty-first century. It embarks on a reading and brief reception study of two popular mashups: Kim Newman’s The Bloody Red Baron, an alternate history novel that imagines Count Dracula leading the German forces during WWI, and Billy Ludwig’s manipulations of old photos from WWII, modified to include iconic images from Star Wars. Both texts juxtapose the objects of history with overtly fantastical elements, creating an inherently ironic whole.
Because mashups often engage with the material traces of the past more directly than other texts, they can potentially illustrate the relationship between historical objects and neo-historical fictions more clearly. Historical fictions rely paradoxically on our suspension of disbelief, and on our recognition that what they present is not ‘authentic’. They require us to preserve an ironic distance from history in order to be successful as performances or texts. The play of ironic distance in the mashup draws attention to this paradox, generating meaning.
Monster mashups, like other 21st-century remixes, are engaged in appropriation on multiple levels. They borrow the form and content of earlier work, but they also appropriate mass media’s powerfully effective modes of communication. In the ideological shift that enables this efficiency, repetition and recognition overpower representation. The past effectively becomes everything in our interpretation of the present, and each of the traditions from which the neo-historical monster mashup borrows engages with the past in a different way. This paper gives a brief look at how the monster mashup might be utilised to understand what the insertion of monsters into historical texts and contexts says about the purpose of fantasy in the 21st century, and about the ever-blurrier line between history and fiction.
Ultimately, this paper shows how historiographic metafiction (specifically Neo-Victorian fiction) uses trauma to rewrite the past (and sometimes to pre-write the future) in order to validate both the individual and broader cultural present of the reader. Rather than seeking comfort in the completeness of a Victorian past, Neo-Victorian texts like Poor Things and Cloud Atlas find comfort in its illusory nature.
With this context in mind, in this thesis I explore the boundaries and connections between remix culture and its ‘others’ (adaptation, parody, the Gothic, Romanticism, postmodernism), asking how strong or tenuous they are in practice. I do so by examining remix culture’s most ‘monstrous’ texts: Frankenfictions, or commercial narratives that insert fantastical monsters (zombies, vampires, werewolves, etc.) into classic literature and popular historical contexts. Frankenfiction is monstrous not only because of the fantastical monsters it contains, but because of its place at the margins of both remix and more established modes of appropriation. Too engaged with tradition for some, and not traditional enough for others, Frankenfiction is a bestselling genre that nevertheless remains peripheral to academic discussion. This thesis aims to address that gap in scholarship, analysing Frankenfiction’s engagement with monstrosity (chapter one), parody (chapter two), popular historiography (chapter three), and models of authorial originality (chapter four). Throughout this analysis, Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein remains a touchstone, serving as an ideal metaphor for the nature of contemporary remix culture.
These are some of the questions addressed in the Genealogy of the Posthuman, a growing peer-reviewed, online and multi-authored resource that traces the prefigurations, currency and evolving potential of contemporary thought on the posthuman.
We invite contributions by academics, researchers and doctoral students from all disciplines that explore posthumanist questions, issues, tensions in the work of a given author or thinker, or in a particular theme or motif. The Genealogy features entries informed by the re-examination and critique of posthumanism’s acknowledged, unsuspected and evolving dimensions.
Entries should be informative and should seek to make a critical intervention in the field. Submissions may consist of a standalone entry or one that is linked to and engages with existing contributions. Prospective contributors are invited to browse the entries already published on the site (http://criticalposthumanism.net/genealogy/) to familiarise themselves with the Genealogy’s form and rationale and to identify potential areas of interest.
Submissions should be around 1000 words in length and should include up to 8 keywords. Images and video clips may also be included with submissions. Contributors are requested to follow the MHRA style sheet (www.mhra.org.uk/index.php/series/MSG) and all references should appear as footnotes. Articles are to be submitted as a Word document, in the form of an email attachment. All entries are peer-reviewed and authors can expect attentive and helpful feedback.
For more information about Critical Posthumanism and the Genealogy project go to http://criticalposthumanism.net/about/. Email info@criticalposthumanism.net for further details or enquires.
Submissions are to be sent to submissions@criticalposthumanism.net.
Rather than attempting to define fantasy, horror, weird, or science fiction as distinct genres, we wish to take up Katheryn Hume’s expansive definition of fantasy as anti-mimetic, or as ‘any departure from consensus reality’ (Fantasy and Mimesis, 1984, p. 21), in order to engage with the broader artistic motivation to question the limits of the real. This symposium, then, will explore the political and cultural functions of such fantasies. To what extent does the impulse to create fantasy art comment back upon this ‘consensus reality’, and to what extent does it represent a separate reality? How might the fantastical characters and environments that populate our contemporary cultural landscape be informed by the experience of twenty-first-century metropolitan life, and how do such texts (in)form that experience in return?
Roger Schlobin claims that the ‘key to the fantastic is how its universes work, which is sometimes where they are, but is always why and how they are’ (‘Rituals' Footprints Ankle-Deep in Stone’, 2000, p. 161). With this claim in mind, we invite submissions from any discipline that address the relationship between current cultural, social and political dialogues and fantasy texts – specifically ones that interrogate dominant structures of power, normativity and ideology.
Keynotes: Christina Bashford (Illinois) & Frank Trentmann (Birkbeck)
Neo-Victorian Plenary: Patricia Duncker (Manchester)
We welcome proposals for individual papers, and encourage proposals for panels (3-paper sessions).