Erasing Frankenstein

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).

This creation, birthed by the Erasing Frankenstein Collective, rips open a passionate new relationship, both to Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel, and to the carceral ‘conditions of unfreedom’ with which the project contended. Again and again, I was struck by the crushing and the emergence of love and humanity it explores. Wonderfully provocative commentary encircles the work-on prison, erasure poetry, and the experiential ethics of this project itself. Erasing Frankenstein has much to teach us about the ‘mess’ and the value of public humanities. Unforgettable contribution!" - Simone Weil Davis, co-founder of the Walls to Bridges ProgramErasing Frankenstein serves as an exemplary model of how theory meets praxis. This book will be an invaluable resource for any faculty member (nationally and internationally) working in prison education programs or any public-facing, humanities project, or programming. That this project includes for-credit university education, public outreach, artistic practice and product, and scholarly discussion makes it a model for twenty-first century public humanities programs that will determine the fate of the humanities, not only within the university, but also in the world." —Lissette Lopez Szwydky, author of Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (2020)

• Introduction: Meet the Monster: I or Us by The Erasing Frankenstein Collective - Elizabeth Effinger in collaboration with Sue Sinclair I or Us - The Erasing Frankenstein Collective Chapter 1: The Harms of Incarceration and the Transformative Potentiality of Art: Reflections from Experiential Knowledge - Nyki Kish Chapter 2: "Harm Asks Questions of Me": On the Practice and Ethics of Erasure Poetry - Sue Sinclair Chapter 3: The Composite Art and Carceral Aesthetics of I or Us - Elizabeth Effinger Chapter 4: Embracing the "workshop of filthy creation": Frankenstein, Failure, and the Public Humanities - Elizabeth Effinger Afterword - Mark A. McCutcheon Further Reading: Annotated List of Erasure Poems Bibliography