ABSTRACT
The story behind the creation of Mary Shelley’s influential work, Frankenstein, is almost as famous as the novel itself: in 1816, Lord Byron challenged a group of friends—Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Polidori, Claire Clairmont, and Mary Godwin (the future Mrs. Shelley)—to invent the most frightening horror story they could imagine. Both the novel and its famed origin story have recently been adapted on page and on screen: in 2019, Jeanette Winterson published her reworking of the novel, Frankissstein—an unsettling tale influenced by current global preoccupations with the very real possibility of posthumanism. Similarly, in 2020, the sci-fi television serial Doctor Who also turned to the novel in the episode “The Haunting of Villa Diodati”. This episode sees the Doctor visit Mary Shelley and her companions on the night that inspired her to write Frankenstein. In this chapter, we examine these two adaptations alongside anxieties about human consciousness and posthuman existence in a world that faces an increasingly urgent apocalyptic crisis. This chapter will show how both adaptations, along with their source material Frankenstein, are thematic bedfellows: each examines the idea of what it means to be an embodied human creation.
