The Cinematic Rebirths of Frankenstein

Book flyer
MS Word
International
MS Word

The Cinematic Rebirths of Frankenstein Universal, Hammer, and Beyond

(Click to Enlarge)

Caroline Joan (Kay) S. Picart

ISBN: 0-275-97363-8

ISBN-13: 978-0-275-97363-6

DOI:

240 pages

Praeger Publishers

Publication: 10/30/2001

List Price: $110.95 (UK Sterling Price: £76.95)

Availability: Print on demand

Media Type: Hardcover

Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4

Subjects:

Description: 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 new 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 thirties 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.

Table of Contents:

Preface
Introduction
Envisaging the Monstrous
The Universal Series
Beyond the Universal and Hammer Series
Mythic (Im)Mortality
Bibliography
Index

About the Author: 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).

LCC Class: 791


All rights reserved. Copyright © 1999-2009 ABC-CLIO 130 Cremona Dr., Santa Barbara, CA 93117, 805-968-1911