Between legacy and revival : a postmodern reading of mary Shelly's Frankenstein and Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad

Abstract EN

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.