Gathering the limbs of the text in Shelley Jackson’s "Patchwork girl"

Abstract

Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl is not simply a new recreation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in hypertext format; it also tries to develop some of the implications in the original text from the paradigms of contemporary science and criticism. This study is an attempt to bring to light the ways in which these paradigms, characterized by their emphasis on fragmentariness, are made to interact dialogically with Shelley’s novel in order to produce a postmodern version of the old Promethean myth. Apart from exploring the filial connections that one might expect in any rewriting exercise, this essay focuses on the way Jackson questions the concept of authorship, origin(ality) and literary property, and related issues such as intertextuality and assemblage, all of which are indices of the theoretical concerns underlying Jackson's text and of the ways in which it follows, re-writes or invites us to re-read Shelley's “hideous progeny.