Available Formats
A Book of Monsters: Promethean Horror in Modern Literature and Culture
By (Author) David Ashford
Manchester University Press
Manchester University Press
29th April 2026
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
Cultural studies
Philosophy: aesthetics
Theory of architecture
Horror, ghost stories and supernatural fiction
Traditional or cultural fiction and true stories, tales and retellings
823.0873809
Paperback
248
Width 138mm, Height 216mm
This books traces the rise to prominence in the twentieth-century of a sub-genre of gothic fiction that is, emphatically, a horror of enlightenment rationality rather than gothic darkness, examining post-modern revisions of Modernist "Promethean" tropes in an eclectic range of gothic, fantasy and SF writing. Whether the subject be terror of London's churches in the psychogeographical fiction of Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore, the Orcs in the linguistic fantasies of J.R.R. Tolkien, King Kong, killer-computers, or demon-children in post-war British science-fiction, A Book of Monsters offers illuminating perspectives on the darker recesses of the post-modern imagination, setting out a compelling, and comprehensive, overview on our contemporary unconscious.
David Ashford is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Groningen