Erasing Frankenstein: Remaking the Monster, a Public Humanities Prison Arts Project - Paperback

by Elizabeth Effinger (Editor)

Who gets to write poetry? Whose voices are made public? Whose voices are heeded?

Erasing Frankenstein showcases a creative exchange between federally incarcerated women and members of the prison education think tank Walls to Bridges Collective at the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ontario, and graduate and undergraduate students from the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. Working collaboratively by long-distance mail, the artists and contributors made the first-ever poetic adaptation of Frankenstein, turning it into a book-length erasure poem, I or Us. An example of "found art," an erasure poem is created by erasing or blacking out words in an existing text; what is left is the poem. The title reflects the nature of the project: participants have worked as "I"'s, each creating their own erased pages, but together worked as an "us" to create a collaged "monster" of a book.

Erasing Frankenstein presents the original erasure poem I or Us alongside reflections from participants on the experience.

Author Biography

Elizabeth Effinger is an Associate Professor of English at the University of New Brunswick where she teaches British Romanticism with special interests in William Blake, the intersections of Romantic science and literature, the Anthropocene, human-animal studies, pedagogy and the public humanities. She co-edited William Blake's Gothic Imagination: Bodies of Horror (Manchester University Press, 2018).