Assembling the body/text: Frankenstein in new media

As the other chapters in this collection attest, the chilling talc which Mary Shelley concocted on a dark night in Switzerland in 1 81 6 has maintained a narrative urgency through the intervening centuries, its afterlife sustained through adaptation and transformation via the dominant and/or cutting-edge technologies of each era. This long history of adaptation has continued into new media platforms, creating opportunities to consider how the themes of the novel interact with notions of hybrid textuality, new media identities, and the boundaries of the human offered by an engagement with digital frameworks for storytelling. This is in addition to the great extent to which the themes pursued in the text resonate with contemporary concerns around biotechnology, genetic modification, and the threat of a posthuman future. Shelley Jackson's CD-ROM-based multimedia work Patchwork Girl, by Mary !Shelley and Herself (1995), composed and published in the early days of hypertext enthusiasm, is a nearly new media work that grapples with Shelley's novel and its themes, while Dave Morris's highly esteemed iPad 'app' adaptation of Frankenstein (2012) is an example of a maturing digital media format treatment.