Gothic Remixed: Coming 31 October 2019

It’s official! Gothic Remixed: Monster Mashups and Frankenfictions in 21st-Century Culture is now with Bloomsbury Academic’s production team, and will be coming to a bookshop near you in October. The book is already available to preorder at this link.

If you’re teaching or researching the Gothic, adaptation studies, or popular media, please do consider requesting Gothic Remixed for your library! Alternately, if you have deep pockets you can spring for a hardback edition of your very own (currently retailing at £76.50 on the Bloomsbury website). A paperback edition will hopefully follow shortly.

Bloomsbury’s website also provides a short blurb and the table of contents:

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, Frankenfiction is 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 such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies; television series like Penny Dreadful; and the visual arts in the prints of Travis Louie. Megen de Bruin-Molé takes culture’s most ‘monstrous’ and liminal works to show how a safe and familiar format disrupted by the thrill of transgression has resulted in the mashups that dominate Western popular culture.

Table of contents

Chapter One: Frankenfictions

– Gothic Remixed
– Monstrous Adaptations
– The Many Faces of Frankenfiction
– Twenty-First-Century Remix Culture
– Frankenfiction as Remix
– Frankenfiction as Adaptation
– Frankenfiction as Appropriation
– Hauntings and Illegitimate Offspring

Chapter Two: Adapting the Monster

– From ‘Miserable Wretch’ to ‘Modernity Personified’: Defining the Twenty-First-Century Monster
– ‘Ourselves Expanded’: Anno Dracula and the Neoliberal Vampire
– The Empire Strikes Back: Victorian Monsters and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
– ‘We Are All Monsters’: Reclaiming Privilege in Penny Dreadful
– ‘Monstrum Sum‘: Intersectional Monstrosity in The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club
– The Promises of Monsters

Chapter Three: Mashing Up the Joke

– Camp as Sincere Parody
– The Irony of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies; Or, Taking Historical Fiction Seriously
– Literature with a Twist: Parodying the Classics
– Parodying Neo-Victorianism
– Taking the Past Seriously; Or, The Limits of Postmodern Irony
– Conclusion: Beyond Postmodern Irony

Chapter Four: Remixing Historical Fiction

– The Gothic and Historical Fiction
– The ‘Look’ of the Past: Visual Gothic Histories
– Sublime Metamorphosis: Dan Hillier’s Victorian Illustrations
– Foreign Animals: The Immigrant Portraiture of Travis Louie
– Meet the Family: Colin Batty’s Victorian Cabinet Cards
– Flux Machine: Kevin J. Weir’s Animated Horrors
– Conclusion: Unnatural History

Chapter Five: Appropriating the Author

– Frankenfiction and Romantic Authorship
– Frankenfiction and the (Un)Death of the Author
– Frankenfiction and Transmedia World-Building
– Women’s Work: Mary Shelley as Remixer/Remixed
– Feminist Frankenfiction?
– Conclusion: The Monster Always Escapes
– Bibliography

Reviews

“Gothic Remixed offers a fresh and exciting new take on twenty-first century Gothic. It addresses texts across a range of media that have often been dismissed as parasitic or derivative and champions their significance while remaining alert to their ethical shortcomings. By showing how monstrosity becomes the animating principle of Gothic mashups, hybrid texts and ‘Frankenfictions’, the book sheds light on emerging forms of Gothic cultural production and provides a cohesive framework for reading the incohesive. De Bruin-Molé is working at the cutting edge of contemporary Gothic and her book will be indispensable for students and scholars with an interest in the field.” –  Catherine Spooner, Professor of Literature and Culture at Lancaster University

“Stitching together adaptation theory and remix studies with surgical precision, De Bruin-Molé has produced the first book on the modern monster mashup. Authoritative, insightful and immensely enjoyable, Gothic Remixed heralds the arrival of an exciting new voice to contemporary Gothic studies.” –  Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes, Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Film at Manchester Metropolitan University

Click here to check out Gothic Remixed on the publisher’s website.

Edited 15/06/2019: Gothic Remixed will now be released on October 31st (Halloween 2019). This post has been updated accordingly.

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