L’ Ombre du mythe : Frankenstein délivré (Brian Aldiss), une relecture du Prométhée moderne ?

Abstract

In the introduction to his Dictionary of literary myths, Pierre Brunel suggests that literature is a repository of myths, and that since myth comes to us coated with literature, it is already literary. Conversely, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a literary narrative which became mythical thanks to multiple rewrites and adaptations across multiple literary genres and media. It is the very intermediality of Shelley’s work that Brian Aldiss questions in Frankenstein Unbound (1973): he does not rewrite the original novel but extends the literary myth and introduces an unprecedented variation through science fiction. With this new sci-fi dimension, Aldiss does not adapt the original narrative to a new medium (such as theater, cinema or comic book), but to a new literary genre, a new register, one which was built to a large extent using Shelley’s novel as its strongest foundation.