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Ryan J. Stark surveys the classic monsters in great literature and film, television, the Bible, and, perhaps unexpectedly, the world in which we live. Monsterdom is real, Stark observes, but often hidden beneath the concealment spell of modern secular thought. This guidebook aims to break that spell, and, if so, to confirm once more a world that brims with high strangeness, or what Christian philosophers have always called'reality.'The book appeals to those who study the paranormal dimensions of religion and horror, broadly imagined. The clergy will also find it helpful, as will players of monster-riddled video games.

Monsters have always rampant border crossers, from Dracula's journey from Romania to Whitby, to the rampaging monsters of Godzilla movies across global cities. This volume studies how their transnationality reflects an era of global crisis. Monstrosity has long been explored in a number of ways that connect gender, sexuality, class, race, nationality and other forms of otherness with depictions of monsters or monstrosity. This book, however, explores cultural flow as it relates to the construction of a transnational genre, by both producers and audiences. It also examines the ramifications of representations of monstrosity in socio-political terms as they relate to a tumultuous era of global crises. This era has of course been amplified and altered by the Covid pandemic, which frames much of the content of this collection. This ongoing crisis imbues the discourses of monstrosity, global catastrophe and societal and human vulnerability with its significant expression in artistic terms.

Using an innovative multidisciplinary approach which is deeply invested in posthumanist thought, this book demonstrates how reading science fiction shapes the way we engage with lived environments. In dialogue with works by widely studied science fiction authors Greg Bear, N.K. Jemisin, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Jeff VanderMeer, it draws out how they function as mutant narratives. The first to systematically integrate three fields – feminist posthumanism, cognitive narratology, and science fiction studies – it offers a complex and coherent understanding of readerly experience as material, embodied, dynamic, and imaginative. Covering a range of urgent topics, including climate fiction, New Weird fiction, and new phenomenologies of the body, this book is the first to demonstrate how readerly experience acts as a site for ethical and political reorientation in the time of climate change.

How the monsters of nineteenth-century literature and science came to define us.“Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?” In We Are All Monsters, Andrew Mangham offers a fresh interpretation of this question uttered by Frankenstein's creature in Mary Shelley's 1818 novel in an expansive exploration of how nineteenth-century literature and science recast the monster as vital to the workings of nature and key to unlocking the knowledge of all life forms and processes. Even as gothic literature and freak shows exploited an abiding association between abnormal bodies and horror, amazement, or failure, the development of monsters in the ideas and writings of this period showed the world to be dynamic, varied, plentiful, transformative, and creative.In works ranging from Comte de Buffon's interrogations of humanity within natural history to Hugo de Vries's mutation theory, and from Shelley's artificial man to fin de siècle notions of body difference, Mangham expertly traces a persistent attempt to understand modern subjectivity through a range of biological and imaginary monsters. In a world that hides monstrosity behind theoretical and cultural representations that reinscribe its otherness, this enlightened book shows how innovative nineteenth-century thinkers dismantled the fictive idea of normality and provided a means of thinking about life in ways that check the reflexive tendency to categorize and divide.

Taking Mary Shelley's novel as its point of departure, this collection of essays considers how her creation has not only survived but thrived over 200 years of media history, in music, film, literature, visual art and other cultural forms. In studying monstrous figures torn from the deepest and darkest imaginings of the human psyche, the essays in this book deploy the latest analytical approaches, drawn from such fields as musicology, critical race studies, feminist studies, queer theory and psychoanalysis. The book interweaves the manifold sounds, sights and stories of monstrosity into a conversation that sheds light on important social issues, aesthetic trends and cultural concerns that are as alive today as they were when Shelley's landmark novel was published 200 years ago.

El volumen aborda distintas fórmulas de expresión del monstruo no realista en parte de la narrativa hispánica —Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, España, México, Perú, El Salvador, Uruguay y Venezuela—. Los enfoques estéticos, filosóficos, políticos, sociales, biopolíticos, necropolíticos, de género, poshumanistas y ecocríticos permiten obtener una visión de la riqueza cultural del mundo hispánico a través de las figuraciones de seres ominosos en los que se depositan temores e incertidumbres y con los que se bosqueja la denuncia de violencias y totalitarismos. La combinación de perspectivas teóricas y críticas, diacrónicas y sincrónicas, nacionales y transatlánticas, así como de imaginarios populares y globales, demuestran que los monstruos fantásticos, de ciencia ficción y de otras modalidades insólitas —dobles, fantasmas, cíborgs, clones, zombis, brujas, casas encantadas y cuerpos e identidades monstruosas, entre otras encarnaciones—, a pesar de su sesgo de imposibilidad, remiten a la realidad humana y revelan una visión lúcida acerca del presente.

An Anthology of Monsters by Cherie Dimaline, award-winning author of The Marrow Thieves, is the tale of an intricate dance with life-long anxiety. It is about how the stories we tell ourselves can help reshape the ways in which we think, cope, and ultimately survive. Using examples from her books, from her mère, and from her own late night worry sessions, Dimaline choreographs a deeply personal narrative about all the ways in which we tell stories. She reveals how to collect and curate our stories, how they elicit difficult and beautiful conversations, and how family and community is a place of refuge and strength.

The monstrous has a long, complicated history within children's popular media. In Monstrous Youth: Transgressing the Boundaries of Childhood in the United States, Sara Austin traces the evolution of monstrosity as it relates to youth culture from the 1950s to the present day to spotlight the symbiotic relationship between monstrosity and the bodies and identities of children and adolescents. Examining comics, films, picture books, novels, television, toys and other material culture—including Monsters, Inc. and works by Mercer Mayer, Maurice Sendak, R. L. Stine, and Stephanie Meyer—Austin tracks how the metaphor of monstrosity excludes, engulfs, and narrates difference within children's culture. Analyzing how cultural shifts have drastically changed our perceptions of both what it means to be a monster and what it means to be a child, Austin charts how the portrayal and consumption of monsters corresponds to changes in identity categories such as race, sexuality, gender, disability, and class. In demonstrating how monstrosity is leveraged in service of political and cultural movements, such as integration, abstinence-only education, and queer rights, Austin offers insight into how monster texts continue to reflect, interpret, and shape the social discourses of identity within children's culture.

Nicole C. Dittmer offers a reimagining of the popular Gothic female “monster” figure in early-to-mid-Victorian literature. Regardless of the extensive scholarship concerning monstrosities, these pre-fin-de-siècle figurations have often been neglected by critical studies or interpreted as fragments of mind and body which create a division between culture and nature. In Monstrous Women and Ecofeminism, Dittmer deploys monism to delineate from and contest such dualism, unifies the material-immaterial aspects of fictional women, and blurs the distinction between nature-culture. Blending intertextual disciplines of medical sciences, ecofeminism, and fiction, she exposes female monstrosities as material and semiotic figurations. This book, then, identifies how women in the Victorian Gothic are informed by the entanglement of both immaterial discourses and material conditions. When repressed by social customs, the monistic mind-body of the material-semiotic figure reacts to and disrupts processes of ontology, transforming women into “wild” and “monstrous” (re)presentations.

Monstruosité, altérité, marginalité font partie intégrante de l'oeuvre d'E. T. A. Hoffmann, écrivain romantique allemand anticonformiste, maître du fantastique, qui a exercé une forte influence à l'étranger, notamment sur Baudelaire en France et sur Poe en Amérique. Cet ouvrage analyse, à la lumière de certains personnages insolites, les procédés qu'il a utilisés pour créer un monde étrange et grotesque qui interroge sur le réel et sur les grandes problématiques contemporaines, comme celles de l'homme augmenté, de la transgression des normes et de l'acceptation des différences. Il met en évidence l'originalité et la clairvoyance de cet auteur pratiquant en permanence l'ironie, l'autodérision et le multiperspectivisme.

As monster theory highlights, monsters are cultural symbols, guarding the borders that society creates to protect its values and norms. Adolescence is the time when one explores and aims at crossing borders to learn the rules of the culture that one will fit into as an adult. Exploring the roles of monsters in coming-of-age narratives and the need to confront and understand the monstrous, this work explores recent developments in the presentation of monsters--such as the vampire, the zombie, and the man-made monster--in maturation narratives, then moves on to discuss monsters inhabiting the psychic landscapes of child characters. Finally, it touches on monsters in science fiction, in which facing the monstrous is a variation of the New World narrative. Discussions of novels by M. R. Carey, Suzanne Collins, Neil Gaiman, Theodora Goss, Daryl Gregory, Sarah Maria Griffin, Seanan McGuire, Stephenie Meyer, Patrick Ness, and Jon Skovron are complemented by analysis of television series, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Westworld.

Monsters in Greek literature are often thought of as creatures which exist in mythological narratives, however, as this book shows, they appear in a much broader range of ancient sources and are used in creation narratives, ethnographic texts, and biology to explore the limits of the human body and of the human world.This book provides an in-depth examination of the role of monstrosity in ancient Greek literature. In the past, monsters in this context have largely been treated as unimportant or analysed on an individual basis. By focusing on genres rather than single creatures, the book provides a greater understanding of how monstrosity and abnormal bodies are used in ancient sources. Very often ideas about monstrosity are used as a contrast against which to examine the nature of what it is to be human, both physically and behaviourally. This book focuses on creation narratives, ethnographic writing, and biological texts. These three genres address the origins of the human world, its spatial limits, and the nature of the human body; by examining monstrosity in these genres we can see the ways in which Greek texts construct the space and time in which people exist and the nature of our bodies.This book is aimed primarily at scholars and students undertaking research, not only those with an interest in monstrosity, but also scholars exploring cultural representations of time (especially the primordial and mythological past), ancient geography and ethnography, and ancient philosophy and science. As the representation of monsters in antiquity was strongly influential on medieval, renaissance, and early modern images and texts, this book will also be relevant to people researching these areas.

Les monstres ont toujours existé, et on les représente au moins depuis l'Antiquité. Pourtant, ce terme qui était populaire il y a quelques décennies à peine est rarement énoncé de nos jours, sauf – essentiellement – dans une perspective morale (ou moralisatrice). On peut néanmoins trouver un sens à la monstruosité ; mais comment la définir de la manière la plus neutre possible? On pourrait avancer, prudemment, qu'il s'agit d'un écart marqué par rapport à une norme qui elle-même varie en fonction du contexte culturel, social ou politique. Le Frankenstein de Mary Shelley, la figure la plus ancienne examinée dans cet ouvrage, sert un peu de fil conducteur à ce parcours qui s'attarde sur des oeuvres de fiction dans lesquelles le monstre est pensé par la science et la technologie, ou plutôt par leur imaginaire souvent débridé. Dans ce cadre précis, le fantasme du monstre permet de diverses façons de se pencher sur des concepts comme ceux d'hybridité, d'altérité, de cyborg, d'animalité humaine et sur des rapports plus complexes que prévu entre nature et culture. Penser le monstre comme une figure épistémique pour réfléchir aux savoirs de tous les temps : un but ambitieux, que l'auteur de cet essai atteint sans encombre.

An eye-opening, engrossing look at the central role of monsters in the Anglo-Saxon worldview—now in paperback. This book addresses a simple question: why were the Anglo-Saxons obsessed with monsters, many of which did not exist? Drawing on literature and art, theology, and a wealth of firsthand evidence, Basilisks and Beowulf reveals a people huddled at the edge of the known map, using the fantastic and the grotesque as a way of understanding the world around them and their place within it. For the Anglo-Saxons, monsters helped to distinguish the sacred and the profane; they carried God's message to mankind, exposing His divine hand in creation itself. At the same time, monsters were agents of disorder, seeking to kill people, conquer their lands, and even challenge what it meant to be human. Learning about where monsters lived and how they behaved allowed the Anglo-Saxons to situate themselves in the world, as well as to apprehend something of the divine plan. It is for these reasons that monsters were at the very center of their worldview. From map monsters to demons, dragons to Leviathan, we neglect these beasts at our peril.

'Ese monstruo llamado Roberto Arlt: mistagogo de la Década Infame, inventor de intrigas imposibles y creador de caracteres odiadores, esperpénticos y rumiantes. ¿Cómo escribir sobre Roberto Arlt hoy? ¿Cómo volver a hablar sobre ese oscuro profeta urbano al que ya tantos grandes nombres de la crítica —Oscar Masotta, David Viñas, Carlos Correas, Ricardo Piglia, Horacio González, Sylvia Saítta, el propio Aira— han asediado desde todos los ángulos posibles? En Roberto Arlt. El Monstruo, Diego Cano nos demuestra que todavía hay preguntas para hacer, que todavía es posible el diálogo con aquel malandrín de la literatura argentina que escribió en orgullosa soledad libros que encierran la violencia de un cross a la mandíbula, destinados a hacer bufar a los eunucos del buen gusto y a deleitar a los cofrades de la imaginación. Tal como ya lo había hecho con su Franz Kafka. Una literatura del absurdo y de la risa (Bärenhaus, 2020), Diego Cano logra un estudio que funciona como una introducción perfecta para quien nunca ha recorrido la extraña escritura de Arlt, pero también como una relectura sagaz que hará pensar hasta al más mentado arltólogo. Un recorrido que, ofreciendo claves de lectura, dialoga con la tradición y con el presente, y allí donde cita a Dostoievski también repone a César Aira. Cano es uno de esos atípicos lectores, totalizadores y minuciosos a la vez, capaz de transmitir su asombro, que es el asombro de la literatura, y de estimular ese evanescente deseo que es el de deseo de leer'(Agustín Conde De Boeck).

Goblins explores the beasts we've loved, hated, and longed to be. In a searing exploration of her personal obsessions and preoccupations—from disturbing 80s fantasy films and uncanny puppets in modern art, to sexual predators in music scenes and her longing to'become a goblin'like her icons and fellow performers in DIY punk—Jen Calleja shows us the ways she has lived in relation to these base, hungry, selfish and carefree creatures.

Drawing on a rich array of textual and visual primary sources, including medicine, satires, play scripts, dictionaries, natural philosophy, and texts on collecting wonders, this book provides a fresh perspective on monstrosity in early modern European culture. The essays explore how exceptional bodies challenged social, religious, sexual and natural structures and hierarchies in the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and contributed to its knowledge, moral and emotional repertoire. Prodigious births, maternal imagination, hermaphrodites, collections of extraordinary things, powerful women, disabilities, controversial exercise, shapeshifting phenomena and hybrids are examined in a period before all varieties and differences became normalized to a homogenous standard. The historicizing of exceptional bodies is central in the volume since it expands our understanding of early modern culture and deepens our knowledge of its specific ways of conceptualizing singularities, rare examples, paradoxes, rules and conventions in nature and society.

This book is the Cambria Sinophone World Series, headed by Professor Victor H. Mair (University of Pennsylvania) and includes color images. This book examines the interconnection between the idea of monstrosity and the emergence of Chinese cultural identity since the Song dynasty. Using four case studies on the developmental history of the fox demon, Zhang Fei, Sun Wukong, and Zhong Kui in vernacular literature, it explores how monstrosity, through its traditional connection to foreignness, played a crucial role in shaping society's idea regarding the self/other dichotomy. Chinese vernacular literature matured during the Southern Song period and coincided with society's growing apprehension of foreignness. As society's perception of the other fluctuated between acceptance and abhorrence following the Mongolian conquest of the Middle Kingdom and the subsequent political desire to return to a fixation with the concept of Han during the Ming dynasty, the idea of monstrosity was adopted by these works as a logical vessel for contemplating the question of identity. Unlike other forms of written work in China, vernacular literature developed out of the necessity to cater to the mass. As such, they provide a unique window to understand society's reaction to the cultural and political milieu of the time. By resituating the production of these works within this cultural backdrop, the importance of this study lies both in the foregrounding of the manifestation of Chinese cultural identity in the literary and the proposition of its importance to our understanding of the cultural politics since the Song dynasty. Although academics have long been aware of the importance of the cultural milieu of the Song-Yuan-Ming period to the development of Chinese cultural identity, there remains a lack of attention to the evolution of this identity during this time. The aim of this book is to explore the way cultural identity is encapsulated by the idea of monstrosity and how vernacular literature offers a window into society's continuous attempt to redefine this concept, in response to a shifting political landscape. But beyond its timely discussion of the background and historical genealogy of how Chineseness is conceptualized, this book specifically addresses the effect of the contentiousness of ethnicity on the identity question. In doing so, it explores how this gradual historical transformation of Chinese cultural identity is closely tied to xenophobia and the reimagination of foreignness as reflected in the idea of monstrosity. Students and scholars of Late Imperial Chinese literature are likely to find this book refreshing and informative. However, its overall thrust of the development of Chinese cultural identity should also appeal to readers who are interested in Early Modern Chinese history, especially those fascinated by questions concerning the formation of Chinese cultural identity.

Taking in a wide range of film, television, and literature, this volume explores 21st century horror and its monsters from an intersectional perspective with a marked emphasis on gender and race. The analysis, which covers over 70 narratives, is organized around four primary monstrous figures--zombies, vampires, witches and monstrous women. Arguing that the current horror renaissance is populated with willful monsters that subvert prevailing cultural norms and systems of power, the discussion reads horror in relation to topics of particular import in the contemporary moment--rampant sexual violence, unbridled capitalist greed, brutality against people of color, militarism, and the patriarchy's refusal to die. Examining ground-breaking films and television shows such as Get Out, Us, The Babadook, A Quiet Place, Stranger Things, Penny Dreadful, and The Passage, as well as works by key authors like Justin Cronin, Carmen Maria Machado, Helen Oyeyemi, Margo Lanagan, and Jeanette Winterson, this monograph offers a thorough account of the horror landscape and what it says about the 21st century world.

Desafios, diferencias y deformaciones de la ciudadania: mutantes y monstruos en la produccion cultural latinoamericana reciente se inserta dentro del creciente interes en los estudios sobre ciudadania al tener como objetivo el entender las diferentes formas en las que las politicas-economicas neoliberales cuestionan, controvierten e incluso mutan el concepto de ciudadania y el consecuente derecho a la titularidad de una serie de libertades en un espacio cada vez mas privatizado. Con un enfoque en la produccion cultural latinoamericana contemporanea, los ensayos aqui compilados exploran la presencia del monstruo y del mutante—literal o figurado—como tropos utiles para capturar los matices y las vicisitudes de la cambiante naturaleza de la ciudadania. Desafios, diferencias y deformaciones de la ciudadania busca mostrar como la literatura y el cine conforman espacios privilegiados para representar, problematizar y reflexionar sobre los complicados asuntos de ciudadania en la era neoliberal.

The Metaphor of the Monster offers fresh perspectives and a variety of disciplinary approaches to the ever-broadening field of monster studies. The eclectic group of contributors to this volume represents areas of study not generally considered under the purview of monster studies, including world literature, classical studies, philosophy, ecocriticism, animal ethics, and gender studies. Combining historical overviews with contemporary and global outlooks, this volume recontextualizes the monstrous entities that have always haunted the human imagination in the age of the Anthropocene. It also invites reflection on new forms of monstrosity in an era epitomized by an unprecedented deluge of (mis)information. Uniting researchers from varied academic backgrounds in a common effort to challenge the monstrous labels that have historically been imposed upon'the Other,'this book endeavors above all to bring the monster out of the shadows and into the light of moral consideration.

Longlisted for the 2022 International Gothic Association's Allan Lloyd Smith PrizeThe bestselling genre of Frankenfiction sees classic literature turned into commercial narratives invaded by zombies, vampires, werewolves, and other fantastical monsters. Too engaged with tradition for some and not traditional enough for others, these'monster mashups'are often criticized as a sign of the artistic and moral degeneration of contemporary culture. These hybrid creations are the'monsters'of our age, lurking at the limits of responsible consumption and acceptable appropriation. This book explores the boundaries and connections between contemporary remix and related modes, including adaptation, parody, the Gothic, Romanticism, and postmodernism. Taking a multimedia approach, case studies range from novels like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club series, to television programmes such as Penny Dreadful, to popular visual artworks like Kevin J. Weir's Flux Machine GIFs. Megen de Bruin-Molé uses these monstrous and liminal works to show how the thrill of transgression has been contained within safe and familiar formats, resulting in the mashups that dominate Western popular culture.

Writers in Brazil and Mexico discovered early on that speculative fiction provides an ideal platform for addressing the complex issues of modernity, yet the study of speculative fictions rarely strays from the United States and England. Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead expands the traditional purview of speculative fiction in all its incarnations (science fiction, fantasy, horror) beyond the traditional Anglo-American context to focus on work produced in Mexico and Brazil across a historical overview from 1870 to the present. The book portrays the effects—and ravages—of modernity in these two nations, addressing its technological, cultural, and social consequences and their implications for the human body. In Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead, M. Elizabeth Ginway examines all these issues from a number of theoretical perspectives, most importantly through the lens of Bolívar Echeverría's “baroque ethos,” which emphasizes the strategies that subaltern populations may adopt in order to survive and prosper in the face of massive historical and structural disadvantages. Foucault's concept of biopolitics is developed in discussion with Roberto Esposito's concept of immunity and Giorgio Agamben's distinction between “political life” and “bare life.” This book will be of interest to scholars of speculative fiction, as well as Mexicanists and Brazilianists in history, literary studies, and critical theory.

This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2013. Monstrous Spaces: The Other Frontier, is a collection of essays presented during the First Global Conference of Monstrous Geography held at Manchester College, Oxford. When examining monstrous geographies, we encounter an Other frontier, a space that runs counter to the socially constructed space of culture that at the same time includes, overlaps, and co-occupies the cultural landscape.

This collection examines the intersection of the discourses of “disability” and “monstrosity” in a timely and necessary intervention in the scholarly fields of Disability Studies and Monster Studies. Analyzing Medieval and Early Modern art and literature replete with images of non-normative bodies, these essays consider the pernicious history of defining people with distinctly non-normative bodies or non-normative cognition as monsters. In many cases throughout Western history, a figure marked by what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has termed “the extraordinary body” is labeled a “monster.” This volume explores the origins of this conflation, examines the problems and possibilities inherent in it, and casts both disability and monstrosity in light of emergent, empowering discourses of posthumanism.

Vom antiken Mythos bis zum postmodernen Horrorgenre dominiert im Hinblick auf das Monströse ein narratives Grundgerüst: Das als destruktiv und horribel vorgestellte Ungeheuer bricht in ein soziokulturelles Gefüge ein, erschüttert es, treibt es im schlimmsten Fall an den Rand des Kollapses, woraufhin ein mehr oder weniger heroischer Protagonist es ver‚nicht‘et und dadurch die Voraussetzung für die Restitution der Ordnung schafft, an der der teratologische Widersacher allein durch seinen radikalen Ausschluss partizipiert. In Abgrenzung zu dieser monsterphoben Tradition ist es das Ziel der Arbeit, auf der Grundlage von Texten Platons, Ovids, Rabelais', Shelleys, Nietzsches, Freuds, Kafkas, Foucaults und Cixous'einer alternativen, heterodoxen Ästhetik nachzuspüren, die dem Monströsen eine künstlerische wie theoretische ordnungsstiftende Potenz konzediert oder zumindest dem Rezipienten literarische Etüden in Toleranz gegenüber dem Xenomorphen und der Alterität aufgibt.

Dragons, giants, and the monsters of learned discourse are rarely encountered in the Sagas of Icelanders, and therefore, the general teratological focus on physical monstrosity yields only limited results when applied to them. This, however, does not equal an absence of monstrosity – it only means that monstrosity is conceived of differently. This book shifts the view of monstrosity from the physical to the social, accounting for the unique social circumstances presented in the Íslendingasögur and demonstrating how closely interwoven the social and the monstrous are in this genre. Employing literary and cultural theory as well as anthropological and historical approaches, it reads the monsters of the Íslendingasögur in their literary and socio-cultural context, demonstrating that they are not distractions from feud and conflict, but that they are in fact an intrinsic part of the genre's re-imagining of the past for the needs of the present.

This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2014. Are monsters and the monstrous phenomena that transition time and space? If monsters were a part of our past and are a part of our present, will they be a part of our future? This volume demonstrates the universality of monsters and the ubiquitous nature of monsterisation from different perspectives and shows that the creation of monsters and our ongoing confrontation with them is bound by human sociality; so much so that the monsters we have been surrounded by and will encounter in the future bear characteristics that mirror inherently human modes of identity construction, for example via age, gender and visual appearance. This process can differ across life stages, such as childhood versus adulthood. Monsters, or what a society identifies as monstrous, are not simply cultural artefacts communicated via literature, historical accounts or modern media productions such as films or series. They are integral components of the human psyche. Therefore, they have existed in symbiosis with the homo socius, and will probably continue to do so in his future.

This book views late Victorian femininity, the New Woman, and gender through literary representations of the figure of the monster, an appendage to the New Woman. The monster, an aberrant occurrence, performs Brecht's “alienation effect,” making strange the world that she inhabits, thereby drawing veiled conclusions about the New Woman and gender at the end of the fin-de-siècle. The monster reveals that New Women loved one another complexly, not just as “friend” or “lover,” but both “friend” and “lover.” The monster, like the fin-de-siècle British populace, mocked the New Woman's modernity. She was paradoxically viewed as a threat to society and as a role model for women to follow. The tragic suicides of “monstrous” New Women of color suggest that many fin-de-siècle authors, especially female authors, thought that these women should be included in society, not banished to its limits. This book, the first on the relationship between the figure of the monster and the New Woman, argues that there is hidden complexity to the New Woman. Her sexuality was complicated and could move between categories of sexuality and friendship for late Victorian women, and the way that the fin-de-siècle populace viewed her was just as multifarious. Further, the narratives of her tragedies ironically became narratives that advocated for her survival.

Monströse Figuren spielen in mittelalterlichen Texten eine große Rolle, ihre Relevanz und insbesondere Funktionsweise als poetologische Reflexionsfiguren ist allerdings bisher nicht umfassend betrachtet worden. Anhand dreier mittelhochdeutscher Romane (Hartmanns von Aue Iwein, Heinrichs von dem Türlin Crône und Johanns von Würzburg Wilhelm von Österreich) wird die selbst- und literaturreflexive Dimension von monströsen Figuren herausgearbeitet. Die Polyfunktionalität von Monstern auf den verschiedenen Ebenen zwischen Handlung und Poetologie wird in Engführung von mittelalterlichen philosophisch-theologischen Diskursen und modernen medientheoretischen Ansätzen beschreibbar gemacht. Dazu wird ein Close Reading mit der Analyse intra- und intertextueller Bezüge und kulturwissenschaftlicher Dimensionen verbunden. Die Arbeit bietet Neulektüren zentraler Texte der Altgermanistik und leistet einen Beitrag zur Frage nach mittelalterlicher Theoriebildung und ihrer modernen Beschreibbarkeit.

Representations of shapeshifters are prominent in medieval culture and they are particularly abundant in the vernacular literatures of the societies around the North Sea. Some of the figures in these stories remain well known in later folklore and often even in modern media, such as werewolves, dragons, berserkir and bird-maidens. Incorporating studies about Old English, Norse, Latin, Irish, and Welsh literature, this collection of essays marks an important new contribution to the study of medieval shapeshifters.Each essay highlights how shapeshifting cannot be studied in isolation, but intersects with many other topics, such as the supernatural, monstrosity, animality, gender and identity. Contributors to Shapeshifters in Medieval North Atlantic Literature come from different intellectual traditions, embracing a multidisciplinary approach combining influences from literary criticism, history, philology, and anthropology.

Every culture knows the phenomenon of monsters, terrifying creatures that represent complete alterity and challenge every basic notion of self and identity within a cultural paradigm. In Latin and Greek culture, the monster was created as a marvel, appearing as something which, like transgression itself, did not belong to the assumed natural order of things. Therefore, it could only be created by a divinity responsible for its creation, composition, goals and stability, but it was triggered by some in- or non-human action performed by humans. The identification of something as monstrous denotes its place outside and beyond social norms and values. The monster-evoking transgression is most often indistinguishable from reactions to the experience of otherness, merging the limits of humanity with the limits of a given culture. The topic entails a large intersection among the cultural domains of law, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and technology. Monstrosity has indeed become a necessary condition of our existence in the 21st century: it serves as a representation of change itself. In the process of analysis there are three theoretical approaches: psychoanalytical, representational, ontological. The volume therefore aims at examining the concept of monstrosity from three main perspectives: technophobic, xenophobic, superdiversity. Today's globalized world is shaped in the unprecedented phenomenon of international migration. The resistance to this phenomenon causes the demonization of the Other, seen as the antagonist and the monster. The monster becomes therefore the ethnic Other, the alien. To reach this new perspective on monstrosity we must start by examining the many facets of monstrosity, also diachronically: from the philological origin of the term to the Roman and classical viewpoint, from the Renaissance medical perspective to the religious background, from the new filmic exploitations in the 20th and 21st centuries to the very recent ethnological and anthropological points of view, to the latest technological perspective, dealing with artificial intelligence.

Meet the monsters in this who's who of the baddest of the bad! Like those supernatural beasts everyone knows and fears—the bloodsucking vampire, Count Dracula, and that eight-foot-tall mash-up of corpses, Frankenstein's Monster. Or that scariest of mummies, Cheops, who scientists revived after 4,700 years—big mistake! Or more horrifying yet, the Horla, an invisible, havoc-wreaking creature that herds humans like cattle and feeds of their souls. Drawn from the pages of classic books and tales as old as time, this frightfully exciting collection features 25 of the creepiest creatures ever imagined, from witches and werewolves to dragons and ghosts. Every monster is brought to life in a full-size full-color portrait that captures the essence of the beast, and in lively text that recounts the monster's spine-tingling story. With sidebars that explore the history and the genre of each sourcebook, The Big Book of Monsters is an exciting introduction to literature and language arts.