Between Legacy and Revival: A Postmodern Reading of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad

Document Type : Original Article

Abstract

Throughout two hundred years, Mary Shelly’s revolutionary novel Frankenstein
continues to fascinate and inspire generations yet to come. Being adapted and 
appropriated into wholly new cultural and political domains, Shelly’s genuine work of 
art never ceases to reveal the anxieties of everyday life throughout history. Reviving 
Shelly’s legacy and appropriating it into a wholly new context, the Iraqi writer Ahmed 
Saadawi offers us an insight into the violence and terror of everyday life in Iraq under 
the 2003 US occupation and the wake of the civil war in his award-winning novel 
Frankenstein in Baghdad. The novel is a “shock” in the realm of the Arabic fiction, a 
shock in the way it was written and a shock in its daring way to deal with reality and 
addressing the repressed fears, anxieties and desires of different sects in the society. 
Interweaving fantasy and reality, Saadawi’s novel blurs the lines between good and 
evil, criminals and victims, life and death. By revisiting Shelly’s legacy, this paper 
aims to explore the impact of the Western “hypotext” upon Saadawi’s Arabic 
“hypertext” within a postmodern frame of study.
 

Keywords

References

Arendt, Hannah. On Violence. Orlando: Harcourt Inc., 1969.
Barret, Terry. “Modernism and Postmodernism: An Overview with Art 
Examples”. In Art Education: Content and Practice in a 
Postmodern Era. Ed. James Hutcheons and Marianne Suggs. 
Washington: NAEA, 1997.
Barthes, Ronald. “Theory of the Text”. Untying the Text: A Post-
Structuralist Reader. Ed. Robert Paul. London: Routledge and 
Kegan Paul, 1981.
Beville, Maria. Gothic-postmodernism: Voicing the Terrors of 
Postmodernity. New York: Radopi, 2009.
Botting, Fred. Gothic. London: Routledge, 1996.
Brann, Eva. “What is Postmodernism?”. The Harvard Review of 
Philosophy, Spring 1992, (4-7).
Butler, Christopher. Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction. New 
York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Carpenter, Daniel. “Completely Worth the Wait” – Frankenstein in 
Baghdad. Bookmunch. 16 Feb. 2018. Web. 29. Jun. 2018. 
https://bookmunch.wordpress.com/2018/02/16/completely-worth-
the-wait-frankenstein-in-baghdad-by-ahmed-saadawi/
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth.1963. Trans. Richard Philcox.
 New York: Grove Press, 2004. 
Foucault, Michel. “Language to Infinity” in Language, Counter-Memory, 
Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Oxford: 
Blackwell, 1977.
Frazer, Elizabeth and Elizabeth Hutchings. “Contemporary Political 
Theory – On Politics and Violence: Arendt Contra Fanon”. 
Contemporary Political Theory (2008) 7, 90-108.
Frazer, John. Violence in the Arts. New York: Cambridge University 
Press, 1974.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny” (1919) in Standard Edition of the 
Complete Psychological Works. Vol.17, trans. James Strachey. 
London: Hogarth Press, 1955.
Genette, Gerard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Trans. 
Channa Newman and Claude Doubinskyl . Lincoln: University of 
Nebraska, 1997.
Gupta, Sunam. Imagining Iraq. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Hasan, Harith. “Reading Frankenstein in Baghdad”. Assyrian 
International News Agency. 18 Mar. 2014. Web. 5 Apr. 2015.
http://aina.org/news/20140318152331.pdf
Hassan, Wail. “Frankenstein in Baghdad”. Electra Street. Dec. 2014. 
Web. 29 Jun. 2018. https://electrastreet.net/2014/12/frankenstein-
in-baghdad/
Hogle, Jerold, E. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Hutcheon, Linda. “Postmodernism” in The Routledge Companion to 
Critical Theory. Ed. Simon Malpas and Paul Wake. London: 
Routledge, 2006.
-----------, A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.
Kilgour, Maggie. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. New York: Routledge, 
1995.
King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. London: Futura, 1986.
Kowaleski, Michael. Deadly Musings: Violence and Verbal Form in 
American Fiction. New Jersey: Princeton University press, 1993.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon 
S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Lindsey, Ursula. "The Novel After the Arab Spring." The New Yorker, 18 
May 2014. Web. 20 Mar. 2015.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-novel-after-
the-arab-spring/
Lyotard, Jean-Franois. “What is Postmodernism?” in The Postmodern 
Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of 
Minnesota Press, 1984.
Metz, Sam. “Fiction of Dystopian Times: Ahmed Saadawi’s 
“Frankenstein in Baghdad”. Los Angeles Review of Books, 5 Jun. 
2018. Web. 29 Jun. 2018.
Najjar, Al-Mustafa. “Iraqi Author Ahmad Saadawi: ‘The Novel Implicitly 
Questions This Concept of Salvation’.” Arabic Literature (in 
English), 26 March 2014. Web. 4 Feb. 2015. 
https://arablit.org/2014/03/26/iraqi-author-ahmad-saadawi-the-
novel-implicitly-questions-this-concept-of-salvation/
Oakes, David A. Science and Destabilization in the Modern American 
Gothic. London, Greenwood Press, 2000.
Punter, David. The Literature of Terror Vol.1. New York: Longman, 
1996.
Saadawi, Ahmed. Frankenstein in Baghdad. 2013. Trans. Jonathan 
Wright. New York: Penguin Books, 2018. 
Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London: Routledge, 2006.
Schimmel, Noam. “New Writing from the Arab World.” Majalla, 31 
Aug. 2012. Web. 20 Mar. 2015. 
http://eng.majalla.com/2012/08/article55233812/new-writing-
from-the-arab-world/
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein 1818, or the Modern 
Prometheus. New York: Signet Classics, an Imprint of New 
American Library, a Division of Penguin Group, 2013. 
Schwartz, Michael. War Without End: The Iraq War in Context. Chicago: 
Haymarket Books, 2008.
Stanko, E. “Introduction: Conceptualizing the Meanings of Violence”, in 
The Meanings of Violence, ed. E. Stanko. London: Routledge, 
2003.
Varma, Devendra P. The Gothic Flame. London: Arthur Barker, 1957.
Zeidel, Ronen. “The Iraqi Novel and the Kurds”. In Review of Middle 
East Studies, vol.1,45, no.1 (Summer 2011), 19-34.
Zezek, Slavoj. Violence. London: Profile Books, 2008.

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics