«I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper»: Archetypes of the Disjointed Body after Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Within the variety of recent rewritings of Frankenstein, this paper explores some of the most inventive transmutations of the archetype of the hybrid body and its metaphorical implications. Light is shed, in particular, on Peter Ackroyd’s The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008), where the creature is reinterpreted as a projection of the ‘self’ in a serial murder story, and Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2018), which inspects the figurative resonance of the monster’s reassembled frame against the background of one of the darkest periods of recent history. The second part of the paper more specifically examines Shelley Jackson’s hypertext Patchwork Girl or A Modern Monster (1995) and Mike Bezemek’s abridgment for Twitter , #Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus (2018). In different ways, both works show how the archetype of the disjointed body epitomizes the condition of an increasingly “saturated self” (Gergen 1991), whose identity is constantly redefined by the multiple voices that resonate in digital media (POLETTI - RAK 2014; MCCUTCHEON 2018; Evan 2019)