The Horrid Looking Glass: Reflections on Monstrosity

From the fictional world of vampires, zombies, and invaders from other worlds, to the very real world of revolutionary France and in between, the nature of the monster encompasses the very quality that makes them so believable – that which we perceive as ‘other’. While there is a commonality in this otherness, the monster lurking in the shadows, concealed in darkness or conjured with a few lines from a horror novel suggests the monster as one onto which we are free to project the most distorted and un-human features. In each chapter of this volume, you will discover that the way in which we project what is monstrous is not a singular other but is in fact a part of our own self-identity. The greatest horror of the monster is not that it stands apart, but that once we pull it from the shadow of our own projected imagination; we discover that that the monster we fear is also bound to our own mirror image. To look at the monster, to name that which must never be named, is to look upon a reflection and embrace a part of our nature we do not wish to see.

As the fourth gathering of scholars to bring light to this darkened world of Monsters and the Monstrous, the goal is not to turn away in fear, but to confront, explore, and ask questions of them. Within the pages of this volume are the results of the conversations that took place among them.
Table of Contents

Introduction
Paul L. Yoder

The Zombie as Other: Mortality and the Monstrous in the Post-Nuclear Age
Kevin Alexander Boon

Un/Monstrous Criminals – The ‘Gay Gang Murders’: ‘Not Like Us’ and ‘Just Like Us’
Kristen Davis

Seven Legs My True Love Has: Fantasies of Female Monstrosity in American Horror Fiction
Dara Downey

Mutable Monstrosity in Bill Condon’s Gods and Monsters
Duane W. Kight

A Mirror of Monsters: Escapes of Revenge Tragedy
Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik

The Nymph and the Witch: Female Magical Figures in the Works of Paracelsus
Peter Mario Kreuter

To Be or Not to Be a Monster
Claudia Lindner Leporda

Monstrous Modernism, Monstrous Bodies: Christian Iconography and Degenerate Art
Jennifer McComas

The Gay Male as Byzantine Monster: Civil Legislation and Punishment for Same-Sex Behaviour
Stephen Morris

Legless Ghosts and Female Grudge: Analysis of Japanese Ghosts
Natsumi Ikoma

The Eternal Changeling: Dracula’s Transformations through the 1970s
Sorcha Ní Fhlainn

The Monstrous Hero: Medicine and Monster-Making in Late Victorian Literature
Sylvia A. Pamboukian

Loving the Alien: A Moral Re-Evaluation of Paedophiles
David White

Strange Hells: The British Soldier and the Monster on the Western Front
Ross Wilson

Walls: Sade, Silling and Satire
Paul L. Yoder

Paul Yoder is a Professor of English at Truman State University, United States, and chairs the Department of Education. He has published articles on Mary Shelley and the Marquis de Sade as well as psychological studies related to the causes of school violence. Peter Mario Kreuter is a Research Fellow at the Sudost-Institut in Regensburg, Germany. He has published on the popular vampire belief in Southeastern Europe and a bundle of smaller studies about Paracelsus as well as articles related to the early modern history of the Danubian Principalities.