Re/articulated Monstrosity: Mary and Her Creature

One of the most famous and well-examined authors in biofiction for young adults is Mary Godwin Shelley; such a focus on her life and works in the genre comes as no surprise when her most famous novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), was written when Shelley was only eighteen or nineteen. The mythos surrounding Shelley’s life and her seminal text are, like her creature, revived in considerations in fiction and graphic novel form. Chapter 2 reads Antoinette May’s The Determined Heart (2015) and Lita Judge’s Mary’s Monster (2018) as texts that enact a kind of double vision, wherein they return to the historical past through Shelley and her creature to illuminate the connection between monstrosity and adolescence by framing Mary Godwin Shelley and/as her creature.