Folded Flesh: Material Grammar and the Translational Afterlife of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) has generated an exceptionally rich history of textual revision, visual adaptation, and intersemiotic translation. While its cinematic and graphic afterlives have contributed substantially to the construction – and contestation – of the cultural iconography of the Creature, this article examines a comparatively neglected stage in that history: a contemporary pop-up adaptation in which Shelley’s narrative is simultaneously abridged, illustrated, spatialised, engineered, and physically activated. Bringing book history and material-textual studies into dialogue with translation studies and multimodal analysis, the article approaches the pop-up not as an illustrated abridgement but as a materially changing multimodal book-object. Targeted linguistic comparison examines shifts in focalisation, speech representation, evaluative lexis, lexical reformulation, and grammatical agency alongside their redistribution across visual and material modes. The analysis argues that two apparently divergent translational processes operate synergically within the volume. Intralingual translation condenses, selects, and accelerates Shelley’s verbal narrative, while intersemiotic translation expands selected moments visually, spatially, kinetically, and materially. Verbal contraction thus becomes the condition for material expansion, producing not semiotic impoverishment but a new economy in which modes redistribute, echo, qualify, and transform one another. Close multimodal readings of selected exemplary scenes demonstrate how paper engineering develops an emergent “material grammar” organised particularly around projection and disclosure. These material operations also reconfigure Shelley’s construction of Otherness. The tension between the Creature as hypervisible body and unrecognised speaking subject becomes a multimodal issue in which visual and material salience may construct monstrosity while narrative, spatial, and verbal resources simultaneously destabilise it. The article further argues that Gothic affect migrates into the mechanics of reading itself: animation, spatial intrusion, concealment, repetition, and tactile discovery transform conventions associated with the ludic and supposedly child-friendly pop-up into vehicles of disturbance. Finally, the interaction between graphic sequence and paper engineering is shown to transform not only Frankenstein but the receiving forms themselves. The resulting hybrid object challenges conventional distinctions among comic, graphic novel, movable book, children’s classic, Gothic narrative, and collectible artefact. Like Shelley’s Creature, the adaptation is assembled from heterogeneous parts; its formal “monstrosity”, however, lies precisely in their productive interdependence. The pop-up thus emerges as a particularly revealing material afterlife of Frankenstein: an adaptation that reanimates the classic by transforming both the work and the forms through which it can continue to live.