Review of: Gothic Afterlives: Reincarnations of Horror in Film and Popular Media, Lorna Piatti-Farnell (ed.) (2019) London: Lexington Books, 248 pp., ISBN 978-1-4985-7822-6 (cloth: alk. paper), p/bk, AUD 95 ISBN 978-1-4985-7823-3 (electronic), p/bk, AUD 90
This article examines Peter Ackroyd's popular Gothic novel The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008), which is a reimagining of Mary Shelley's famous Gothic novel Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus ([1818] 2003). The basic premise of Ackroyd's narrative seemingly resembles Shelley's own, as Victor Frankenstein woefully reflects on the events that have brought about his mysterious downfall, and like the original text the voice of the Monster interrupts his creator to recount passages from his own afterlife. However, Ackroyd's adaption is instead set within the historical context of the original story's creation in the early nineteenth century. Ackroyd's Frankenstein studies at Oxford, befriends radical Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, moves to London to conduct his reanimation experiments and even accompanies the Shelleys, Byron and Polidori on that fateful holiday when the original novel was conceived. This article explores how Ackroyd's novel, as a form of the contemporary 'popular' Gothic, functions as an uncanny doppelgänger of Shelley's Frankenstein. By blurring the boundaries between history and fiction, the original text and the context of its creation haunt Ackroyd's adaptation in uncannily doubled and self-reflexive ways that speak to Frankenstein's legacy for the Gothic in popular culture. The dénouement of Ackroyd's narrative reveals that the Monster is Frankenstein's psychological doppelgänger, a projection of insanity, and thus Frankenstein himself is the Monster. This article proposes that this final twist is an uncanny reflection of the narrative's own 'Frankenstein-ian' monstrous metafictional construction, for it argues that Ackroyd's story is a 'strange case(book)' haunted by the ghosts of its Gothic literary predecessors.
In this editorial, the editors introduce the 12.2 volume of The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture. The dynamic and interdisciplinary nature of the field is discussed with reference to the collection of articles within the volume, highlighting the malleability of popular culture in all its transdisciplinary forms. The editors provide a summary of the seven articles included in the volume, which collectively represent diverse critical discussions of the field across sociopolitical, socioeconomic and sociocultural artistic realms. The articles examine the evolving realms of the monstrous, the mythic, the heroic and the historical through various mediums like television, film, characters and historical moments. The editors then conclude by offering a summary of the three book reviews included in the volume.
In our twenty-first century context, we tell stories through the foods we eat, the images we share, the people we follow on social media, the shows we watch and the music we listen to. From film to television, from Twitter accounts to the latest fandom trend, popular culture provides us with channels through which our narratives of everyday can transform from immaterial notions to very material and tangible objects of consumption. At the centre of our ways of storytelling lies the formation of our identities. This editorial introduces a Special Issue of the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture that is focused on exploring the many complex intersections between storytelling, identity and popular culture.
