Zombies, vampires and ghosts feature prominently in nearly all forms of entertainment in the 21st century, including popular fiction, film, comics, television and computer games. But these creatures have been vital to the entertainment industry since the best-seller books of a century and half ago. Monsters don't just invade popular culture, they help sell popular culture. This collection of new essays covers 150 years of enduringly popular Gothic monsters who have shocked and horrified audiences in literature, film and comics. The contributors unearth forgotten monsters and reconsider familiar ones, examining the audience taboos and fears they embody.

An important contribution to the growing interdisciplinary field of monster studies

Existing research on monsters acknowledges the deep impact monsters have especially on Politics, Gender, Life Sciences, Aesthetics and Philosophy. From Sigmund Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’ to Scott Poole’s ‘Monsters in America’, previous studies offer detailed insights about uncanny and immoral monsters. However, our anthology wants to overcome these restrictions by bringing together multidisciplinary authors with very different approaches to monsters and setting up variety and increasing diversification of thought as ‘guiding patterns’. Existing research hints that monsters are embedded in social and scientific exclusionary relationships but very seldom copes with them in detail. Erving Goffman’s doesn’t explicitly talk about monsters in his book ‘Stigma’, but his study is an exceptional case which shows that monsters are stigmatized by society because of their deviations from norms, but they can form groups with fellow monsters and develop techniques for handling their stigma. Our book is to be understood as a complement and a ‘further development’ of previous studies: The essays of our anthology pay attention to mechanisms of inequality and exclusion concerning specific historical and present monsters, based on their research materials within their specific frameworks, in order to ‘create’ engaging, constructive, critical and diverse approaches to monsters, even utopian visions of a future of societies shared by monsters. Our book proposes the usual view, that humans look in a horrified way at monsters, but adds that monsters can look in a critical and even likewise frightened way at the very societies which stigmatize them.

This is the first study of monstrosity in Jewish history from the Middle Ages to modernity. Drawing on Jewish history, literary studies, folklore, art history and the history of science, it examines both the historical depiction of Jews as monsters and the creative use of monstrous beings in Jewish culture. Jews have occupied a liminal position within European society and culture, being deeply immersed yet outsiders to it. For this reason, they were perceived in terms of otherness and were often represented as monstrous beings. However, at the same time, European Jews invoked, with tantalizing ubiquity, images of magical, terrifying and hybrid beings in their texts, art and folktales. These images were used by Jewish authors and artists to push back against their own identification as monstrous or diabolical and to tackle concerns about religious persecution, assimilation and acculturation, gender and sexuality, science and technology and the rise of antisemitism. Bringing together an impressive cast of contributors from around the world, this fascinating volume is an invaluable resource for academics, postgraduates and advanced undergraduates interested in Jewish studies, as well as the history of monsters.

Emerging from depths comes a series of papers dealing with one of the most significant creations that reflects on and critiques human existence. Both a warning and a demonstration, the monster as myth and metaphor provides an articulation of human imagination that toys with the permissible and impermissible. Monsters from zombies to cuddly cartoon characters, emerging from sewers, from pages of literature, propaganda posters, movies and heavy metal, all are covered in this challenging, scholarly collection. This volume the third in the series presents a marvellous collection of studies on the metaphor of the monster in literature, cinema, music, culture, philosophy, history and politics. Both historical reflection and concerns of our time are addressed with clarity and written in an accessible manner providing appeal for the scholar and lay reader alike. This eclectic collection will be of interest to academics and students working in a range of disciplines, such as cultural studies, film studies, political theory, philosophy and literature studies.

From the 'Monster of Ravenna' to the 'Elephant Man', Myra Hindley and Ted Bundy, the visualisation of 'real', human monsters has always played a part in how society sees itself. But what is the function of a monster? Why do we need to embody and represent what is monstrous? This book investigates the appearance of the human monster in Western culture, both historically and in our contemporary society. It argues that images of real (rather than fictional) human monsters help us both to identify and to interrogate what constitutes normality; we construct what is acceptable in humanity by depicting what is not quite acceptable. By exploring theories and examples of abnormality, freakishness, madness, otherness and identification, Alexa Wright demonstrates how monstrosity and the monster are social and cultural constructs. However, it soon becomes clear that the social function of the monster – however altered a form it takes – remains constant; it is societal self-defence allowing us to keep perceived monstrosity at a distance. Through engaging with the work of Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva and Canguilhem (to name but a few) Wright scrutinises and critiques the history of a mode of thinking. She reassesses and explodes conventional concepts of identity, obscuring the boundaries between what is 'normal' and what is not.

Much has been written about gender and the monstrous, but sustained engagement with textual manifestations of cultural and unconscious fears and anxieties about "unnatural" reproduction has been limited. This book expands the current discourse on the monstrous reproductive potential of bodies-as well as minds-from a more interdisciplinary and transhistorical framework. While scholarly interest in monsters and the monstrous is certainly not new, studies on monstrous reproduction and birth have tended to be either discipline or period specific, and many are now dated. Drawing from diverse interdisciplinary perspectives in film and media studies, literary studies, history, medicine and women's and gender studies, Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity builds upon pre-existing work while engaging more directly with monstrous progeny, as well as with unnatural reproduction(s), which threaten to eclipse the future, cast uncertainty on the present, and reimagine the past. Ultimately, then, the primary contribution of this book lies not only with its extensive treatment of reproductive monstrosity and unnatural parturition, but with the breadth and intriguing continuity that only a wide lens can provide. This book does not attempt to provide a complete historical assessment or catalog of the enduring cultural fascination with the reproductive origins and potential of monsters. Rather, it provides diverse interdisciplinary and transhistorical perspectives with single unifying theme of unnatural reproduction(s), which is unique to the collection, remaining central to the concept of monstrosity and its evolving narrative incarnations. This interdisciplinary collection spanning the areas of history, literature, medical humanities, and film and media studies explores the transhistorical textual fascination with reproductive monstrosity and unnatural parturition. The collection's four sections provide perspective on hyperbolic and monstrous representations of reproduction and birth that speak to anxieties and fears about gender and sexuality, codified through "unnatural" manifestations and their progeny. By focusing not only on the effect of the monstrous, but also on its reproduction in a variety of genres and modes from science to cinema, the essays in this collection offer critical insight into enduring questions about the genesis of monsters and their reproductive potential that have long haunted the world and continue to shape many fears about the future. This book analyzes how fears about unnatural reproduction and monstrous offspring-and their frequent connections to the feminine-have proliferated and propagated across the very texts which are repetitively created and consumed. Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity is an important interdisciplinary book for university library collections and scholars working in women's and gender studies, film and media studies, history, literature, and medical humanities.