Frankenstein: A Cultural History [Hardcover]

Susan Tyler Hitchcock (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 17, 2007

A lively history of the Frankenstein myth, tracing its evolution from a Romantic nightmare to its prominence in today's imaginative landscape.

Frankenstein began as the nightmare of an unwed teenage mother in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1816. At a time when the moral universe was shifting and advances in scientific knowledge promised humans dominion over that which had been God's alone, Mary Shelley envisioned a story of human presumption and its misbegotten consequences. Two centuries later, that story is still constantly retold and reinterpreted, from Halloween cartoons to ominous allusions in the public debate, capturing and conveying meaning central to our consciousness today and our concerns for tomorrow. From Victorian musical theater to Boris Karloff with neck bolts, to invocations at the President's Council on Bioethics, the monster and his myth have inspired everyone from cultural critics to comic book addicts. This is a lively and eclectic cultural history, illuminated with dozens of pictures and illustrations, and told with skill and humor. Susan Tyler Hitchcock uses film, literature, history, science, and even punk music to help us understand the meaning of this monster made by man. 68 illustrations

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Literary historian Hitchcock (Mad Mary Lamb: Lunacy and Murder in Literary London) leads readers on a guided tour of Frankenstein appearances in this colorful and consistently entertaining narrative. The history begins, appropriately, with the monster's unlikely creation by Mary Shelley as a result of a ghost story challenge (also taken up by John William Polidori, whose tale of a vampyre would later inspire Bram Stoker). Hitchcock then lays bare the publishing world of the 19th century, a veritable Wild West of unauthorized stage adaptations, parodies and continuations in which Frankenstein thrived. James Whale's Karloff classic gets its due, as do the disturbing and innovative 1910 Edison Company production and the 1952 live television broadcast starring a drunk Lon Chaney Jr. Running throughout the book is the parallel story of the invocation of Frankenstein in the public discourse as a metaphor for subjects ranging from the Crimean war to genetically modified organisms. While some Frankenstein dilettantes might find the narrow focus of the book somewhat tedious, there are enough strange and delightful anecdotes to keep most readers engaged. B&w illus. (Oct.)
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About the Author

Susan Tyler Hitchcock’s last book was Mad Mary Lamb: Lunacy and Murder in Literary London. Married with two children, she lives near Charlottesville, Virginia.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition edition (October 17, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393061442
• ISBN-13: 978-0393061444
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #352,460 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More Frankenstein than you can shake a "stitch" at!, September 30, 2007

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Louis (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Frankenstein: A Cultural History (Hardcover)

For 191 years, Frankenstein's hulking monstrosity could be found, not only in our nightmares, but also on bookshelves, comic-book racks, theater stages, movie and television screens, as well as toy-store shelves. The monster indeed cast quite a long shadow across our popular culture and literary historian, Ms. Hitchcock (Mad Mary Lamb: Lunacy and Murder in Literary London), does a Herculean effort to enlighten the reader to the many facets and incarnations of the monster- from Shelley's original novel, to Karloff's tragic portrayal, to Dick Briefer's 1950's horror comic The Monster of Frankenstein and beyond.

Frankenstein: A Cultural History is a comprehensive and entertaining account of Shelley's infamous literary creation, and serves as a testament to the popularity of that, in Shelley's own words, "hideous phantasm of a man."

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars He's Alive!, October 23, 2007

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Frankenstein: A Cultural History (Hardcover)

The monster lives! Truer than any proclamation on a theater marquee, Frankenstein's monster still walks among us as it has for almost 200 years since it was first created. Susan Tyler Hitchcock, who last traced literary history in _Mad Mary Lamb_, has been on the lookout for the monster for the past twenty years, and now has written _Frankenstein: A Cultural History_ (Norton). "My guiding assumption has been that the monster's story says something important. Otherwise we would not keep telling it." The retellings are not just movies, although these do keep coming long after the archetypal films of Boris Karloff. Hitchcock traces the story in stage plays, television comedies, pulp novels, comics, plastic models, and breakfast cereals. The monster has risked being trivialized ever since its inception, but especially in our scientific age, it keeps scaring us with intimations that we may know too much for our own good.

Mary Shelley produced an original story but one not without its antecedents. Shelley subtitled her story, published in 1818, "The Modern Prometheus", drawing on the legend of the god who suffered for giving humans fire. She also drew upon the science of the time that was investigating how bodies twitched when sparked with electricity. Immediately after her novel was published, there were stage productions that introduced business that was not in the novel, like the bumbling laboratory assistant, electrical reanimation machines, a monster mute except for grunts and groans, an angry crowd seeking the monster and its creator, and a cataclysmic ending of them both at the climax. It was in 1931 that "something irreversible happened to Frankenstein", the film from Universal Studios. It "... locked in new and indelible imagery for the Monster. It had so wide and powerful an influence that ever since, renditions of the story have either depended on, ricocheted off, or actively defended against associations with it." The reputation of the Shelley novel had gone into decline (more in the ascendant now with appreciation of the romantic movement and of women authors) and few knew of the original story, but everyone came to know the monster as portrayed by Boris Karloff. Karloff's image (with its sutures, bolts in the neck, and square-topped head, all developed by makeup artist Jack Pierce) is the image even for those who haven't seen the old movies.

Frankenstein, along with Dracula, rescued Universal Studios and sparked endless remakes and sequels. They became standards of television in the 1950s, when Universal's horror library was marketed to local television stations, which in turn made programs of them called something like "Thrill Theater" or "Creature Feature", hosted by a local ghoul like Vampira or M. T. Graves. The broadcasts were pitched to adults, but they became a staple of adolescents who were potential audiences for new films like _I Was a Teenage Frankenstein_. When we were making our first voyages into outer space, _Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster_ came in 1964. In the movies, German scientists might make the life force of the monster which might be irradiated in Japan. Dr. Frank N. Furter was the demented host in _The Rocky Horror Picture Show_, singing, dancing, and bent on making Rocky, a creature that would satisfy his every sexual need. Commercial applications multiplied: General Mills brought forth Frankenberry cereal and a beer-and-hot-dog franchise trademarked the name "Frank 'n Stein". It's all here in Hitchcock's entertaining compilation, and it is all fun, except that the horror never goes away. Shelley's ambiguous creature is still around to scold us when we fret that we might be tampering with nature without knowing what the future might bring. Genetic modification may never recover from the etymological sneer "Frankenfood" coined in 1992 for modified crops, and there are also now "Frankenpigs" (although I think surely someone could have done a catchier neologism with "Frankenswine"). We are not about to stop our tampering, and so the monster will never be slowed by trivialization or commerce. It will haunt us forever.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Prometheus Unhinged, December 6, 2007

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Samuel D. Uretsky "Samskara" (Wantagh NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Frankenstein: A Cultural History (Hardcover)

Frankenstein and Dracula were born on the same night -- sort of. The story of how Mary and Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Byron's physician, John Polidori, spent an evening in the Villa Diodati, which resulted in the creation of these two seminal horrors has been told often enough, but probably never as well as Ms. Hitchcock does. After that, she goes on to discuss the book, and the frequent reiterations that have helped the Monster adapt to changing social mores and cultural needs. She writes well, and for the most part accurately, making this small cultural icon a fascinating subject.
If there is a flaw to the book, and I can't say for certain that there is, it seems as if Ms. Hitchcock has focused narrowly on her subject, and may, perhaps, have accepted general opinions regarding subject that were merely peripheral to the primary theme. A case in point is her dismissal of Lord Byron's treatment of his illegitimate daughter Allegra Biron (Byron chose this spelling as a way of aknowledging parenthood without confering legitimacy.) Ms. Hitchcock seems to accept the conventional wisdom that Byron was unfeelings and uncaring, as tossed the poor child aside to be raised by a group of Italian nuns -- an opinion which is largely trounced in Doris Langley Moore's "Lord Byron -- Accounts Rendered". I have no convenient way of testing other minor details -- and it's hard to say whether this type of thing really matters given the focus of the book.
Since most people haven't read the original novel (it's not an easy read) Ms. Hitchcock gives an excellent understanding of Ms. Shelley's inspiration and creation, and her discussion of the subsequent interpretations of the work is lively and interesting. This is a good academic work suitable for casual reading, and probably a must read for fans of horror movies and horror fiction.