Lidia Curti’s Hideous Progeny: Monstrous Mothers and Transgressive Bodies

The echoes of Frankensteinare perceivable across severalfundamental issues related to feminist and queer studies today. Lidia Curti’s writing was in its way prophetic of the way Mary Shelley’s archetypes would feature in recent debates on gender, creativity, and the body; it also works as a powerful antidote to the shortcomings of identity politics as applied to literature and the arts. Starting from her reflections on Frankenstein, this contribution intends to show the contemporary relevance of her thought by putting it in dialogue with two rewritings of Shelley’s work: Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things (1992) and Jeannette Winterson’s Frankissstein (2019). Both works are instances of the Frankenstein’s “hideous progeny,” as they cannibalize it and perpetuate its constant engagement with the present; as acts of both homage and desecration, they resonate withCurti’s own approach to Shelley’s canonical work, and her dissident yet rigorous method of reading the classics.