Like Frankenstein, she is an adapter sewing together parts from older texts like the Prometheus myth, Paradise Lost, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Faust, and Caleb Williams…”(Perry 138). For starters, “Intertextuality is the very seed of Mary Shelley’s novel. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a text that has produced “nearly infinite variations in every conceivable popular and highbrow medium,” as Dennis Perry explains, and the novel is a text that is especially suited to adaptation and intertextual interpretations (137). Frankenstein and Penny Dreadful: Adaptation and Intertextualities ![]() By replicating and reinterpreting this scene over the course of three seasons, he engages the earlier text in a dialogue that highlights a sentimental rhetorical strategy for generating sympathy in the audience, which is present in both texts. Logan’s series revises this key scene by selecting social spaces and communities that make interesting interpretive sense – whether to appeal to 21st century attitudes, reflect 19th century cultural contexts, or imagine an origin story that Shelley’s story leaves out. He replicates the sequence by emphasizing the creature’s isolation, then placing him within a community that seems uniquely suited and willing to accept him, and then destroying that stability and acceptance each time he gets close to enjoying it. ![]() He does so by replicating and revising the plot sequence of a key scene in Shelley’s novel – when the creature is rejected by the De Lacey family. ![]() In Penny Dreadful (Showtime/Sky Atlantic, 2014-16), creator John Logan interprets and reimagines one of the central concepts of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)– social exclusion and the desire for sympathy and community. × Current About Archive Submit Editorial Board Salisbury University Content to Suffer Alone: Generating Sympathy in Frankenstein and Penny Dreadful Colleen Fenno Ladwig
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