The first review for Gothic Remixed is out on the culture blog Sublime Horror, and I am very excited! In his review Daniel Pietersen suggests that we ‘live in a time of remixes […where] everything seems unpleasantly familiar’. He then explores how Gothic Remixed intervenes in these discussions, highlighting the book’s key arguments and concluding: Gothic … Read more
Gothic Remixed sold out in the UK on the morning of its official publication. You can still order (and still use my 35% discount code GLR MP8), but will likely have to wait a while before your copy arrives!
While you wait for the book arrive back in stock (or at your local library), you might be pleased to know that the PhD thesis the book is based on has just gone Open Access. ‘Frankenfiction: monstrous adaptations and gothic histories in twenty-first-century remix culture’ is free to download from Cardiff University’s online research portal, ORCA. The thesis was supervised by Professor Ann Heilmann, and examined by Professor Catherine Spooner and Professor Anthony Mandal.
Since the publication of Gothic Remixed on 31 October, I have been doing some local publicity. You can read an interview I did with the University of Southampton’s media team at this link. A brief excerpt from the interview is below:
“We have this idea of monsters as ‘others’ and as objects of cult fandom but actually in the last 10-20 years they’re not cult anymore but more mainstream,” Dr de Bruin-Molé explains. “I want people to think about what it means that monsters are now mainstream – is it even possible for a monster, which is inherently peripheral, to be mainstream? What do we do with that? What does that say about our contemporary culture?” [read more here]
On 14 November, The Second Shelf feminist bookshop will also welcome myself and Dr Liz Gloyn to talk about monsters, metamorphoses, and modernity (and for a small launch party). In Gothic Remixed: Monster Mashups and Frankenfictions in 21st-Century Culture, I look at what the current popularity of the ‘monster mash’ can reveal about our assumptions regarding originality, monstrosity, authorship, and historiography; Tracking Classical Monsters in Popular Culture takes Liz on a journey around the contemporary world to explore why the monsters of ancient myth continue to survive in our world. Liz and I will read extracts from our books before a short discussion around the continuing power and meaning of monsters.
This book explores the boundaries and connections between contemporary remix and related modes, including adaptation, parody, the Gothic, Romanticism, and postmodernism. In it, I argue that popular remix creations are the ‘monsters’ of our age, lurking at the limits of responsible consumption and acceptable appropriation. 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.
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.
This article was originally published in Dutch on Hebban.nl, 16 May 2017. I have translated and reproduced it here with the kind permission of the website and the original author, Adinda Volkers. Some of the hyperlinks have also been adapted to redirect readers to equivalent English-language sources.
Warning: this is a political piece. I would not know how to write something apolitical or noncommittal about a book like Max Havelaar. If you don’t care about politics, thinking, the environment, or human rights, please feel free to read something else. But then you’ll miss the zombies!
As part of my forthcoming book project, I’ve been revisiting the Penny Dreadful series and comics. This included looking back at my online reviews of the show’s third and final season, which I will be posting here over the coming weeks. This post originally appeared on The Victorianist, 8 July 2016. It has been edited and corrected for reposting.
In my very first post I rhetorically questioned whether any of the ‘monsters’ in Penny Dreadful would be able to come to terms with their past or their actions. I also asked to what extent the show could be labelled ‘Victorian’ or ‘neo-Victorian’.
When I started writing this week’s post, I had no idea that I would be writing about the end of entire series, as well as the end of the third season. Part of the reason it’s taken me so long to finish it is the way this ending has (unexpectedly) forced me to completely re-evaluate the show, and my expectations of it.
As part of my forthcoming book project, I’ve been revisiting the Penny Dreadful series and comics. This included looking back at my online reviews of the show’s third and final season, which I will be posting here over the coming weeks. This post originally appeared on The Victorianist, 20 May 2016. It has been edited and corrected for reposting.
With a third of this season’s nine-episode run now complete, it’s still surprisingly difficult to judge where we should be at this point in Penny Dreadful’s story arc. Season one forced us to slowly stew in dread and suspense until the last few episodes, building up the struggles and motivations of its central characters. Season two jumped straight into supernatural action, then stepped back to let side stories unravel, and plotlines settle into place.
This blog started in 2014 as a chronicle of my PhD research into Frankenfictions—books, films, television, and fine art that remix classic literature and historical documents in monstrous ways.
Now, four years on, I’m very excited to announce that I’ve just signed a contract with Bloomsbury Academic for my book Gothic Remixed: Monster Mashups and Frankenfictions in 21st-Century Culture. It should be out in hardback sometime in 2019, with a projected paperback release in 2021.
The remix, the mashup, and the reboot have come to dominate Western popular culture. These texts are the ‘monsters’ of our age—hybrid creations that lurk at the limits of responsible consumption and acceptable appropriation. Like monsters, mashups offer audiences the thrill of transgression in a safe and familiar format. And like other popular texts before them, they are often read by critics as a sign of the artistic and moral degeneration of contemporary culture.
With this context in mind, my research explores the boundaries and connections between contemporary remix culture and its Others (adaptation, parody, the Gothic, Romanticism, postmodernism). It often does so by examining remix culture’s most ‘monstrous’ and liminal texts: Frankenfictions, or commercial narratives that insert fantastical monsters into classic literature and popular historical contexts. In this definition, Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein serves as a touchstone, offering an ideal metaphor for appropriative creativity in the twenty-first century.
Frankenfiction includes direct appropriations of classic literature, like the bestselling Quirk Classics novels, but also literary-historical dramas like the Sky/Showtime TV series Penny Dreadful(2014–2016), the depiction of monsters through an historical aesthetic in Travis Louie’s photorealistic paintings, and much, much more. It is monstrous not only because of the fantastical monsters it contains, but because of its position on the boundary between 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 critical discussions of remix.
Gothic Remixed sold out in the UK on the morning of its official publication. You can still order (and still use my 35% discount code GLR MP8), but will likely have to wait a while before your copy arrives!
Since the publication of Gothic Remixed on 31 October, I have been doing some local publicity. You can 
I’m thrilled to announce the official publication of 
