The Monster Theory Reader

(Paperback, 1)

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A collection of scholarship on monsters and their meaning-across genres, disciplines, methodologies, and time-from foundational texts to the most recent contributions.

From the mythical monstrous races of the ancient world to the murderous cyborgs of our day, monsters have haunted the human imagination, giving shape to the fears and desires of their time. And as long as there have been monsters, there have been attempts to make sense of them, to explain where they come from and what they mean. This book collects the best of what contemporary scholars have to say on the subject, in the process creating a map of the monstrous across the vast and complex terrain of the human psyche. Editor Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock prepares the way with a genealogy of monster theory, traveling from the earliest explanations of monsters through psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and cultural studies, to the development of monster theory per se and including Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's foundational essay Monster Theory (Seven Theses), reproduced here in its entirety.

There follow sections devoted to the terminology and concepts used in talking about monstrosity: the relevance of race, religion, gender, class, sexuality, and physical appearance, the application of monster theory to contemporary cultural concerns such as ecology, religion, and terrorism, and finally the possibilities monsters present for envisioning a different future. Including the most interesting and important proponents of monster theory and its progenitors, from Sigmund Freud to Julia Kristeva to J. Halberstam, Donna Haraway, Barbara Creed, and Stephen T. Asma as well as harder-to-find contributions such as Robin Wood's and Masahiro Mori's this is the most extensive and comprehensive collection of scholarship on monsters and monstrosity across disciplines and methods ever to be assembled and will serve as an invaluable resource for students of the uncanny in all its guises.

Reviews

"This book, indeed, may bite. The best books often do."PopMatters

"Weinstock's organization is carefully considered, and the overlap between some of the arguments and works cited between essays suggests that the discipline of monster theory has been built on a bedrock of canonical sources, several of whichmost notably Freud's "The Uncanny"are included in the first section of this book."CHOICE

"In the real world, monstrosity is used as a vague catch-all to justify acts of violence and even murder; these essays offer readers a digestible and critical examination of the monstrous as a way to force us to consider the politics behind what we deem monstrous, and how a deeper understanding of what haunts us may lead to a new, previously unimagined, future."Ploughshares

" An entertaining subject for students."Gramarye

Author Bio

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock is professor of English at Central Michigan University and associate editor for Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. He is the author or editor of twenty-one books, most recently The Age of Lovecraft (Minnesota, 2016); Goth Music: From Sound to Subculture; Return to Twin Peaks: New Approaches to Materiality,Theory, and Genre on Television, and the award-winning Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters.