'Frankenstein' in Turkey

Examines how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been visually adapted and reimagined in Turkish and Middle Eastern contexts, offering a transnational and postcolonial perspective that challenges Western-centric interpretations of the novel’s cultural afterlife.

Despite the extensive research on the transnational afterlife of Frankenstein, the story keeps its prominence in Anglo-American visual and material culture. The scarcity of scholarship on its representation in the East points out the necessity of scholarly approach to how the renowned Western canon is reinterpreted in an utterly different cultural setting in Turkey, which embodies epistemologies of both the East and West due to its critical geopolitical position between Europe and Asia. This scarcity is what brings this book into being as unique research since it recontextualizes and reconfigures the source text with a particular emphasis on Turkish visual aesthetics in the 20th and 21st centuries. By examining the dynamic nature of the transitional identities and human anxiety represented in the cross-cultural adaptations, this book aims to explore how the social and cultural anxieties that influenced Mary Shelley during the early 19th century intersect with the contemporary ontological and epistemological concerns of the 21st-century audience. By analyzing the transnational revitalizations of the novel within the Turkish cultural context, it aims to offer a universal insight into current national, cultural, political, and social anxieties. Its focus is not only on tracing the semiotic orientation between Mary Shelley’s novel and its transnational reinterpretations in Turkish context but also on discussing how the Frankenstein parable is represented within the new socio-cultural and ideological framework of the Middle East.