This edited collection is the first book-length critical study of the Showtime-Sky Atlantic television series Penny Dreadful (2014-2016), which also includes an analysis of Showtime’s 2020 spin-off City of Angels. Chapters examine the status of the series as a work of twenty-first-century cable television, contemporary Gothic-horror, and intermedial adaptation, spanning sources as diverse as eighteenth and nineteenth-century British fiction and poetry, American dime novels, theatrical performance, Hollywood movies, and fan practices. Featuring iconic monsters such as Dr. Frankenstein and his Creature, the “bride” of Frankenstein, Dracula, the werewolf, Dorian Gray, and Dr. Jekyll, Penny Dreadful is a mash-up of familiar texts and new Gothic figures such as spiritualist Vanessa Ives, played by the magnetic Eva Green. As a recent example of adapting multiple sources in different media, Penny Dreadful has as much to say about the Romantic and Victorian eras as it does about our present-day fascination with screen monsters.
Author(s): Julie Grossman, Will Scheibel
Series: Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 286
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
Works Cited
Part I: Welcome to the Night: Issues of Reading and Media
Chapter 2: The Medium Is the Model
Works Cited
Chapter 3: The Adaptive Marketing of Penny Dreadful: Listening to The Dreadfuls
Introduction
Showtime’s Inferior Status
Speaking Dreadful
The Dreadfuls Speak Back
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 4: Penny Dreadful and Frankensteinian Collection: Museums, Anthologies, and Other Monstrous Media from Shelley to Showtime
Part I: Penny Dreadful Collections
Part II: Canons and Characters
Part III: Frankenstein and the Anthology
Part IV: Penny Dreadful as Frankensteinian Collection
Works Cited
Part II: Anatomy of a Monster: Horror and the Gothic in Literature and on the Screen
Chapter 5: In the House of the Night Creatures: Penny Dreadful’s Dracula
Dracula 1
The Woman Question and The Vampire’s Wife
Feminism, Suffrage, and Lily
Psychoanalysis and the Occult
Gothic and Neo-Gothic
Works Cited
Chapter 6: Vampirism, Blood, and Memory in Penny Dreadful and Only Lovers Left Alive
The Myth of Blood: The Body in (Vampire) Films
Penny Dreadful: The Syncretic Vampire of Popular Culture
Melancholizing the Visceral in Only Lovers Left Alive
Works Cited
Chapter 7: “The Dead Place”: Cosmopolitan Gothic in Penny Dreadful’s London
Cosmopolitan Gothic and the Echoes of Empire
The Gothic Flâneur in London’s Labyrinth
Sealing the Gothic Gateway
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 8: Adapting the Universal Classic Monsters in Penny Dreadful: An Uncanny Resurrection
“I Know This Place, I’ve Been Here Before”: Home Texts and Unhomely Adaptations
House of Vanessa Ives: John Logan’s Monster Mash(up)
Works Cited
Part III: The Monster Unbound: Theatrical Performance, Western Dime Novels, and TV Noir
Chapter 9: Penny Dreadful and the Stage: Lessons in Horror and Heritage
Victorian Legacies: The Heritage of Performance in Penny Dreadful
Showtime: The Performance of Heritage in Penny Dreadful
Performance and Spectatorship in Penny Dreadful
Works Cited
Chapter 10: Ethan Chandler, Penny Dreadful, and the Dime Novel; or, Dancing with American Werewolves in London
The Western Hero
The Dark Sidekick
Conclusion: The American Monster
Works Cited
Chapter 11: Dreadful Noir, Adaptation, and City of Angels: “Monsters, All, Are We Not?”
“Where Strangeness is Not Shunned But Celebrated”: Adapting to City of Angels
Cherchez la Femme
“You May Think You Know What You’re Dealing With”: Adapting toward Complexity
Works Cited
Part IV: Meanings of Monstrosity: Identity, Difference, and Experience
Chapter 12: Penny Dreadful’s Palimpsestuous Bride of Frankenstein
The Bride: A Palimpsest of Consent, Class, and Hypersexualization
Pygmalion’s “Perfect” Woman
Gendered Trauma and a “Revolution in Female Manners”
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 13: Predators Far and Near: The Sadean Gothic in Penny Dreadful
The Sadean Libertine
The Marquis de Sade and the Gothic
A Dreadful Mix of High and Low
Works Cited
Chapter 14: “All Those Sacred Midnight Things”: Queer Authorship, Veiled Desire, and Divine Transgression in Penny Dreadful
Works Cited
Chapter 15: Borderland Identities in Penny Dreadful: City of Angels
Works Cited
Index
