Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques (original) (raw)
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Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous
The field of monster studies has grown significantly over the past few years and this companion provides a comprehensive guide to the study of monsters and the monstrous from historical, regional and thematic perspectives. The collection reflects the truly multi-disciplinary nature of monster studies, bringing in scholars from literature, art history, religious studies, history, classics, and cultural and media studies. The companion will offer scholars and graduate students the first comprehensive and authoritative review of this emergent field. Contents: Foreword, John Block Friedman; Introduction: the impact of monsters and monster studies, Asa Simon Mittman; Part I History of Monstrosity: The monstrous Caribbean, Persephone Braham; The unlucky, the bad and the ugly: categories of monstrosity from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, Surekha Davies; Beauteous beast: the water deity Mami Wata in Africa, Henry John Drewal; Rejecting and embracing the monstrous in Ancient Greece and Rome, D. Felton; Early modern past to postmodern future: changing discourses of Japanese monsters, Michael Dylan Foster; On the monstrous in the Islamic visual tradition, Francesca Leoni; Human of the heart: pitiful oni in medieval Japan, Michelle Osterfield Li; The Maya 'cosmic monster' as a political; and religious symbol, Matthew Looper; Monsters lift the veil: Chinese animal hybrids and processes of transformation, Karin Myhre; From hideous to hedonist: the changing face of the 19th-century monster, Abigail Lee Six and Hannah Thompson; Centaurs, satyrs, and cynocephali: medieval scholarly teratology and the question of the human, Karl Steel; Invisible monsters: vision, horror, and contemporary culture, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. Part II Critical Approaches to Monstrosity: Posthuman teratology, Patricia MacCormack; Monstrous sexuality: variations on the vagina dentata, Sarah Alison Miller; Postcolonial monsters: a conversation with Partha Mitter, Partha Mitter with Asa Simon Mittman and Peter Dendle; Monstrous gender: geographies of ambiguity, Dana Oswald; Monstrosity and race in the late Middle Ages, Debra Higgs Strickland; Hic sunt dracones: the geography and cartography of monsters, Chet van Duzer; Conclusion: monsters in the 21st century: the preternatural in an age of scientific consensus, Peter J. Dendle; Postscript: the promise of monsters, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen; Bibliography; Index.
Monsters and the Monstrous: Ancient Expressions of Cultural Anxieties
A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in Antiquity, 2021
Many of the most recognizable monsters in Western culture, such as Medusa, Cerberus, and the Cyclopes, started to appear in literature and art nearly three thousand years ago. Other, more generic types of monstrous or uncanny entities, such as dragons and ghosts, are even older and appear in art and literature across the globe. This chapter covers such creatures in the earliest folk and fairy tales of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean areas, keeping in mind that much of our information comes from tales, or, in most cases, prototypes for tales, embedded within the larger context of Near Eastern and Greek myths. The chapter first considers what the concept of "monster" might have meant for people in those geographical regions thousands of years ago. The chapter then examines what tales from antiquity survive that incorporated monsters, what kinds of monster predominate in these tales, and what the presence and roles of monsters in the tales might have meant.
Monsters: interdisciplinary explorations in monstrosity
Palgrave Communications, 2020
There is a continued fascination with all things monster. This is partly due to the popular reception of Mary Shelley’s Monster, termed a ‘new species’ by its overreaching but admiringly determined maker Victor Frankenstein in the eponymous novel first published in 1818. The enduring impact of Shelley’s novel, which spans a plethora of subjects and genres in imagery and themes, raises questions of origin and identity, death, birth and family relationships, as well as the contradictory qualities of the monster. Monsters serve as metaphors for anxieties of aberration and innovation (Punter and Byron, 2004). Stephen Asma (2009) notes that monsters represent evil or moral transgression and each epoch, to speak with Michel Foucault (Abnormal: lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–75, 2003, p. 66), evidences a ‘particular type of monster’. Academic debates tend to explore how social and cultural threats come to be embodied in the figure of a monster and their actions literalise our deep...
The Journal of Gods and Monsters, 2020
Monsters are often defined as those unfortunate beings displaced from the “normal,” and in the inaugural issue of The Journal of Gods and Monsters, we are exploring this displacement and the role of religious traditions in its construction, maintenance, and complication. Such beings labeled as monsters might be displaced from biology, such as the cynocephalic protagonist of the Greek Life of St. Christopher. Then again, a monster’s displacement could be cultural, as seen in contemporary efforts by some Burmese Buddhists to displace and monstrosize the Rohingya minority. Or it could be soteriological, like the transhistorical phenomenon of Jews and Muslims being made into monsters via their exclusion from some structures of Christian salvation. In this special issue, we present three methodologically-diverse submissions that tackle the issue of monstrosity and displacement from a wide range of regional and temporal arenas, including 1960s West Virginia, 16th-century France, and 1940s science fiction literature. We also present reviews of new and important materials in the field of Monster Theory.
From mythical monsters to future horrors: towards an understanding of the function of monstrosity:
This BA thesis investigates the function of the Monster from the 5th century onwards, with particular attention to whether, and how, this function has changed over time. To this purpose, three texts are analyzed: 'Beowulf', 'The Island of Doctor Morreau' and 'The Calcutta Chromosome', with a narrow focus on how the monsters in the chosen texts function and are described. Anthropological, philosophical, historical and literary approaches to the monster are outlined and to varying extents applied in the analysis of the individual texts. Subsequently, the texts are analyzed in chronological order, with particular emphasis on the function, description, and location of the monsters, with emphasis on the Monsters of 'The Calcutta Chromosome'. Subsequently, I undertake a comparative analysis of the monsters of 'Beowulf', 'The Island of Doctor Morreau' and 'The Calcutta Chromosome', this time focusing on the geographical location of the monsters, and its meaning. Finally, I attempt a theoretically founded analysis of how the monster functions in literature, with particular emphasis on its symbolic function. Here the theory that was explained in the opening chapter is drawn in, in an argument that the monster basically has different layers of functions. Furthermore, it is argued that the functions of the monster has various facets, symbolic and concrete, and that it refuses any clearcut definition. This is supported by McCormack's argument that the core feature of the monster is that it defies categorization. This is used to support the argument that the monster is fundamentally ambiguous. Throughout the thesis, it is argued that the monster is fundamentally a complex entity, and that any attempt to approach the monster from any one theoretical angle will be incapable of grasping this complexity. It is concluded that my thesis, that the monster has always resided beyond the border of what is known, but that this border has moved over time, is fundamentally correct. However, it is also concluded that this is but one aspect of the ambiguous nature of the monster. Furthermore, it is concluded that the monster is a fundamentally transgressive construct, and that the breaching of borders is one of the key functions of the monster. It is noted that general conclusions can only be drawn to a limited extent on the basis of the examined source material. Furthermore, it is emphasized that the purpose of this thesis is more to point to a general trend in the depiction of monstrosity across literary eras, than to make a definitive statement about the monster as a literary concept.
The Epistemological Functions of Monsters in the Middle Ages
Monsters in the Middle Ages assumed significant epistemological functions, providing an image of the complete 'other' in the human quest for the self. Since late antiquity teratology played a big role in literature, art, philosophy, and religion, but meaning and relevance of monsters changed from author to author (the same applies to their visual representation). This article provides an overview of how the image of the monster changed throughout times and how individual writers evaluated them.