Paul Youngquist reveals the cultural politics of embodiment in Britain in the late 18th & early 19th centuries. Drawing on the histories of medicine, economics, liberalism & nationalism, his work shows that bodies are not simply born, but rather built bycultural practices directed toward particular social ends.

Blue skies, palm trees, and flawless white-sand beaches. Clare Prentiss thinks her new home is paradise, and her brand-new job as security chief at the clinic almost seems too good to be true. It is. But the truth is worse than she could ever imagine. Lurid dreams, erotic obsessions, and twisted fantasies aren't the only things that abruptly invade Clare's life. Is someone really peeping into her windows at night? Yes. Could those grotesque things in the woods possibly be real? Yes. Is Clare being stalked? Yes. But not by anything human. By a monstrosity.

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.

Multi-disciplinary in approach & cross-European in scope, this volume explores links between the political & the monstrous in Europe from the Renaissance to the 19th century. These essays stress the continual reinvention & polemical applications of the monstrous.

Sign of sublime excess and transgression, guardian of the threshold and uncanny creature par excellence, the monster of late has also become a mainstay of urban narratives – even while its presence in these texts remains untheorized. The authors in this collection show how artists and writers across the past two hundred years, from William Wordsworth to China Miéville, figure the monster as a barometer of changing urban patterns. Here, monstrosity becomes the herald of embryonic social forms and marginalized populations in portrayals of cities across media – from video games, film and avant-garde sonic experiments to written tales of urban fantasy and gothic ruin. This volume suggests that poetic and municipal structures evolve in tandem. Within its chapters, unearthly buildings and beings signal a host of new urban dispensations.