 | Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor Subjects: American literature -- White authors -- History and criticism; American literature -- African American authors -- History and criticism; African Americans in literature; Race in literature; Race relations in literature; Frankenstein (Fictitious character); For all the scholarship devoted to Mary Shelley's English novel Frankenstein, there has been surprisingly little attention paid to its role in American culture, and virtually none to its racial resonances in the United States. In Black Frankenstein , Elizabeth Young identifies and interprets the figure of a black American Frankenstein monster as it appears with surprising frequency throughout nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. culture, in fiction, film, essays, oratory, painting, and other media, and in works by both whites and African Americans. Young Elizabeth : Elizabeth Young is Professor of English and Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College. She is the author of Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War and co-author of On Alexander Gardner's ""Photographic Sketch Book"" of the Civil War. |
