cyber!Gothic: The Gothic Future from Frankenstein to Text-based Online Gaming

This project involves the intersection of Gothic literature and developments in digital humanities. Tracing issues of embodiment through the Enlightenment, the 19th century, and finally into the digital age, I examine William Cowper's The Anatomie of the Humane Bodies, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and online, text-based collaborative narratives through the critical lens of N. Katherine Hayles' notion of the human vs. the posthuman. Through this, I argue that we might re-examine and expand our definition of the Gothic to include human/posthuman anxieties, and thus include online literature within the Gothic genre