Peter Ackroyd in his 2008 novel The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein establishes a free-play intertextual world through adopting Mary Shelley’s canonical novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) as his palimpsest where he... more
Peter Ackroyd in his 2008 novel The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein establishes a free-play intertextual world through adopting Mary Shelley’s canonical novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) as his palimpsest where he reworks the tradition of the doppelganger (evil twin) whose depiction has its roots in the Gothic. In Ackroyd’s version, the doppelganger changes into the inventive incarnation of the repressed desires of his pivotal character, Victor Frankenstein, and the novelist is able to offer his “genuine” narrative of a postmodernist serial murderer gothic—this time given in the form of a casebook that psychologically disturbed Victor keeps. In The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, Ackroyd manages to give way to a new weltanschauung satisfying the intellectual needs of the twenty-first century by problematizing the relationship between the real and the hallucinatory, and also between the author and the text to question the role of the author as the creator.
