Monster Theory: Reading Culture - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816628556 ISBN 13: 9780816628551

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 1996

Synopsis

Monsters provide a key to understanding the culture that spawned them. So argues the essays in this wide-ranging collection that asks the question, what happens when critical theorists take the study of monsters seriously as a means of examining our culture? In viewing the monstrous body as metaphor for the cultural body, the contributors consider beasts, demons, freaks, and fiends as symbolic expressions of very real fears and desires, signs of cultural unease that pervade society and shape its collective behaviour. Through a sampling of monsters as a conceptual category, these essays argue that our fascination for the monstrous testifies to our continued desire to explore the difference, prohibition and the everchanging borders of possibility. Topics treated include: the connection between Beowulf, Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, and Dr Jekyll's Hyde; the fascination with Chang and Eng, the Siamese twins in 1830s America, and what it has to say about anxieties regarding the recently united states; the idea of monstrosity in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles; the use of monstrosity in medieval anti-muslim polemics; and an exploration of the creation myth embedded in Jurassic Park.

About this edition

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0816628556
• ISBN 13: 9780816628551
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336
• Editor: Cohen Jeffrey Jerome