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.

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.

Amazons and giants, snakes and gorgons, centaurs and gryphons: monsters abounded in the ancient world. Del Lucchese grapples with the concept of monstrosity, showing how ancient philosophers explored metaphysics, ontology, theology and politics to respond to the challenge of radical otherness in nature and in thought.

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.

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.

This book visits the 'Thing' in its various manifestations as an unnameable monster in literature and film, reinforcing the idea that the very essence of the monster is its excess and its indeterminacy. Tied primarily to the artistic modes of the gothic, science fiction, and horror, the unnameable monster retains a persistent presence in literary forms as a reminder of the sublime object that exceeds our worst fears. Beville examines various representations of this elusive monster and argues that we must looks at the monster, rather than through it, at ourselves. As such, this book responds to the obsessive manner in which the monsters of literature and culture are ‘managed’ in processes of classification and in claims that they serve a social function by embodying all that is horrible in the human imagination. The book primarily considers literature from the Romantic period to the present, and film that leans toward postmodernism. Incorporating disciplines such as cultural theory, film theory, literary criticism, and continental philosophy, it focuses on that most difficult but interesting quality of the monster, its unnameability, in order to transform and accelerate current readings of not only the monsters of literature and film, but also those that are the focus of contemporary theoretical discussion.

"Monsters of the Market" investigates modern capitalism through the prism of the body panics it arouses. Examining "Frankenstein," Marx s "Capital" and zombie fables from sub-Saharan Africa, it offers a novel account of the cultural and corporeal economy of global capitalism.