Monster Culture in the 21st Century: A Reader

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

In the past decade, our rapidly changing world faced terrorism, global epidemics, economic and social strife, new communication technologies, immigration, and climate change to name a few. These fears and tensions reflect an evermore-interconnected global environment where increased mobility of people, technologies, and disease have produced great social, political, and economical uncertainty. The essays in this collection examine how monstrosity has been used to manage these rising fears and tensions. Analyzing popular films and televisions shows, such as True Blood, Twilight, Paranormal Activity, District 9, Battlestar Galactica, and Avatar, it argues that monstrous narratives of the past decade have become omnipresent specifically because they represent collective social anxieties over resisting and embracing change in the 21st century. The first comprehensive text that uses monstrosity not just as a metaphor for change, but rather a necessary condition through which change is lived and experienced in the 21st century, this approach introduces a different perspective toward the study of monstrosity in culture.

Reviews

The essays in this new edited collection are . . . designed to address how monstrosity has come to represent the fears that the new century has brought with it. [...] The book does itself an injustice by calling itself a "reader" when, in fact, it is more than just a collection of articles bundled together . . . The editors have clearly worked hard to present a collection of essays in such a way that the book has a through-narrative, and for that they should be congratulated. -- Shane Brown, University of East Anglia, UK * Cinema Journal *
Preoccupied with zombies, vampires, and ever more unholy configurations of human body parts and consciousnesses, the 21st century is proving to be a monstrous time. Monster Culture in the 21st Century offers readers an international and interdisciplinary theoretical toolkit that can help us better understand the monstrous magical ability to reflect and refract immense political, technoscientific, and ecological changes and anxieties. -- Carol A. Stabile, Professor, School of Journalism and Communication and Department of Womens and Gender Studies, University of Oregon, US
Monster Culture in the 21st Century brings together various theoretical and methodological approaches to look critically at the trope of the monstrous as an increasingly ubiquitous mode for managing contemporary crises of identity, technology and globalization through popular media culture. As such it provides refreshing new directions for understanding monster culture beyond metaphor and as a necessary condition of our lives in the 21st century. * Dr. Jane Chi Hyun Park, Senior Lecturer, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies and the United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney, Australia *
Monster Culture in the 21st Century stands out prominently among the wave of . . . new post-millennial studies . . . [It] succeeds as both a research guide and a classroom tool, in large part due to its expansive scope and, yet also, the unusual particular care given to its myriad topics -- John Edgar Browning, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA * Information, Communication and Society *

Author Bio

Marina Levina is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication at the University of Memphis, US. Diem-My T. Bui is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois Chicago, US.