Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor

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.
Black Frankenstein stories, Young argues, effect four kinds of racial critique: they humanize the slave; they explain, if not justify, black violence; they condemn the slaveowner; and they expose the instability of white power. The black Frankenstein's monster has served as a powerful metaphor for reinforcing racial hierarchy--and as an even more powerful metaphor for shaping anti-racist critique. Illuminating the power of parody and reappropriation, Black Frankenstein tells the story of a metaphor that continues to matter to literature, culture, aesthetics, and politics.

Author: Elizabeth Young
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 08/10/2008
Pages: 336
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.95lbs
Size: 8.70h x 5.90w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9780814797167

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 09/12/2008 pg. 19
Choice 01/01/2009

About the Author
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.