The Cinematic Rebirths of Frankenstein: Universal, Hammer, and Beyond

(Hardback)

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The Frankenstein narrative is one of cinema's most durable, and it is often utilized by the studio system and the most renegade independents alike to reveal our deepest aspirations and greatest anxieties. The films have concerned themselves with demarcations of gender, race, and technology, and this study aims to critique the more traditional interpretations of both the narrative and its sustained popularity. From James Whale's "Frankenstein" (1931) through Kenneth Branagh's "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" (1994), the story remains a nuanced and ultimately ambivalent one and is discussed here in all of its myriad terms: aesthetic, cultural, psychological, and mythic. Beginning with an examination of the narrative's origins in the myth of the birth of Dionysus from the thigh of Zeus, "The Cinematic Rebirths of Frankenstein" goes on to consider each of the film's many incarnations, from the Universal horror films of the 1930s through the British Hammer series and beyond. Moving easily between the scholarly and the popular, the book employs both primary texts - including scripts, posters, and documentation of production histories - and a rigorous, scholarly examination of the many implications of this often-misunderstood subgenre of horror cinema.

Reviews

"Michel Foucault described his project in his Archaeology of Knowledge as a kind of intellectual excavation uncovering the silences and ruptures in the institutional discourses that give rise to knowledge in a particular culture. In a similar manner, Kay Picart's extratextual examination of the filmic reconstructions of the Frankenstein story and the myths that inform it constitutes a rich and profound excavation of our post-Romantic culture itself."-Ray Fleming Distinguished University Professor Professor of Modern Languages and Humanities, Florida State University
"The Cinematic Rebirths of Frankenstein is a major contribution to the rhetorical study of film and will surely take its place as the standard work on the Frankenstein films."-Thomas W. Benson Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Rhetoric, Department of Speech Communication, The Pennsylvania State University
.,."Picart's scholarly electricity will make subjects and arguments come alive. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals."-Choice
...Picart's scholarly electricity will make subjects and arguments come alive. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.-Choice
..."Picart's scholarly electricity will make subjects and arguments come alive. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals."-Choice

Author Bio

CAROLINE JOAN (KAY) S. PICART is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities at Florida State University. She is the author of Resentment and the Feminine in Nietzsche's Politico-Aesthetics, Thomas Mann and Friedrich Nietzche: Eroticism, Death, Music, and Laughter, and, with Jayne Blodgett and Frank Smoot, The Frankenstein Film Sourcebook (Greenwood, 2001).