| Summary: | Penny Dreadful is practically a case study for the analysis of the relationship between TV and literature: from intertextuality to transaction, from quotes to allusions, from literature to the book as object, the series includes an astounding number of references (both explicit and implicit) in order to create a world somewhere between horror and the supernatural. It is this rich tapestry that I intend to examine.The story and its characters are openly intertextual, using Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This simple list gives an idea of the treatment the characters receive: they are tools to enter a transactional universe where the viewer must navigate between the pleasure of novelty and that of recognition. But the series also relies on a number of diverse literary references, from Shakespeare to the Grand Guignol Theatre, with the Romantic poets and the “penny dreadful” genre in-between - the latter of these allows the series to maintain a metafictional discourse on its own aesthetics. More generally, the series is a tapestry of literary memories, merging “legitimate” culture (Egyptomania and spiritism, as in Poe’s work for example) and popular culture (comics, role-playing games, steampunk Victorianism). However beyond this background array of references, the series displays a fascination for the book as object, which appears as a gift, in libraries, in letters, as a “Book of the Dead” - to the extent that one could wonder how these different representations of literature participate in a metanarrative produced by the series’ intertextual references.
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