Download or read book Monstrous Nature written by Robin L. Murray and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2016-10-01 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Godzilla, a traditional natural monster and representation of cinema’s subgenre of natural attack, also provides a cautionary symbol of the dangerous consequences of mistreating the natural world—monstrous nature on the attack. Horror films such as Godzilla invite an exploration of the complexities of a monstrous nature that humanity both creates and embodies. Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann demonstrate how the horror film and its offshoots can often be understood in relation to a monstrous nature that has evolved either deliberately or by accident and that generates fear in humanity as both character and audience. This connection between fear and the natural world opens up possibilities for ecocritical readings often missing from research on monstrous nature, the environment, and the horror film. Organized in relation to four recurring environmental themes in films that construct nature as a monster—anthropomorphism, human ecology, evolution, and gendered landscapes—the authors apply ecocritical perspectives to reveal the multiple ways nature is constructed as monstrous or in which the natural world itself constructs monsters. This interdisciplinary approach to film studies fuses cultural, theological, and scientific critiques to explore when and why nature becomes monstrous.
Download or read book Monstrous Nature written by Robin L. Murray and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2016-10-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 5. Zombie Evolution: A New World with or without Humans -- 6. Laughter and the Eco-horror Film: The Troma Solution -- 7. Parasite Evolution in the Eco- horror Film: When the Host Becomes the Monster -- PART 4: Gendered Landscapes and Monstrous Bodies -- 8. Gendering the Cannibal: Bodies and Landscapesin Feminist Cannibal Movies -- 9. American Mary and Body Modification: Nature and the Art of Change -- Conclusion: Monstrous Nature and the New Cli-Fi Cinema -- Filmography -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index
Download or read book Monstrous Kinds written by Elizabeth Bearden and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2019-01-04 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monstrous Kinds is the first book to explore textual representations of disability in the global Renaissance. Elizabeth B. Bearden contends that monstrosity, as a precursor to modern concepts of disability, has much to teach about our tendency to inscribe disability with meaning. Understanding how early modern writers approached disability not only provides more accurate genealogies of disability, but also helps nuance current aesthetic and theoretical disability formulations. The book analyzes the cultural valences of early modern disability across a broad national and chronological span, attending to the specific bodily, spatial, and aesthetic systems that contributed to early modern literary representations of disability. The cross section of texts (including conduct books and treatises, travel writing and wonder books) is comparative, putting canonical European authors such as Castiglione into dialogue with transatlantic and Anglo-Ottoman literary exchange. Bearden questions grand narratives that convey a progression of disability from supernatural marvel to medical specimen, suggesting that, instead, these categories coexist and intersect.
Download or read book Monstrous Women and Ecofeminism in the Victorian Gothic 1837 1871 written by Nicole C. Dittmer and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-04-08 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nicole C. Dittmer offers a reimagining of the popular Gothic female “monster” figure in early-to-mid-Victorian literature. Regardless of the extensive scholarship concerning monstrosities, these pre-fin-de-siècle figurations have often been neglected by critical studies or interpreted as fragments of mind and body which create a division between culture and nature. In Monstrous Women and Ecofeminism, Dittmer deploys monism to delineate from and contest such dualism, unifies the material-immaterial aspects of fictional women, and blurs the distinction between nature-culture. Blending intertextual disciplines of medical sciences, ecofeminism, and fiction, she exposes female monstrosities as material and semiotic figurations. This book, then, identifies how women in the Victorian Gothic are informed by the entanglement of both immaterial discourses and material conditions. When repressed by social customs, the monistic mind-body of the material-semiotic figure reacts to and disrupts processes of ontology, transforming women into “wild” and “monstrous” (re)presentations.
Download or read book Monstrous Possibilities written by Amanda Howell and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-11-04 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on how the abject spectacle of the ‘monstrous feminine’ has been reimagined by recent and contemporary screen horrors focused on the desires and subjectivities of female monsters who, as anti-heroic protagonists of revisionist and reflexive texts, exemplify gendered possibility in altered cultures of 21st century screen production and reception. As Barbara Creed notes in a recent interview, the patriarchal stereotype of horror that she named ‘the monstrous-feminine’ has, decades later, ‘embarked on a life of her own’. Focused on this altered and renewed form of female monstrosity, this study engages with an international array of recent and contemporary screen entertainments, from arthouse and indie horror films by emergent female auteurs, to the franchised products of multimedia conglomerates, to 'quality' television horror, to the social media-based creations of horror fans working as ‘pro-sumers’. In this way, the monograph in its organisation and scope maps the converged and rapidly changing environment of 21st century screen cultures in order to situate the monstrous female anti-hero as one of its distinctive products.
Download or read book Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters written by Markus P.J. Bohlmann and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-03-06 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perhaps because of the wisdom received from our Romantic forbears about the purity of the child, depictions of children as monsters have held a tremendous fascination for film audiences for decades. Numerous social factors have influenced the popularity and longevity of the monster-child trope but its appeal is also rooted in the dual concepts of the child-like (innocent, angelic) and the childish (selfish, mischievous). This collection of fresh essays discusses the representation of monstrous children in popular cinema since the 1950s, with a focus on the relationship between monstrosity and "childness," a term whose implications the contributors explore.
Download or read book Monstrous manifestations Realities and the Imaginings of the Monster written by Agnieszka Stasiewicz-Bienkowska and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-01-04 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An enlightening collection of inter-disciplinary research on the multifarious incarnations of the monster, 'Monstrous Manifestations' invites the reader to venture into the deepest anxieties of the human psyche.
Download or read book The Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children written by Simon Bacon and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2020-09-30 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children raises important questions at the heart of society and culture, and through an interdisciplinary, trans-cultural analysis presents important findings on socio-cultural representations and embodiments of the child and childhood. At the start of the 21st, new anxieties constellate around the child and childhood, while older concerns have re-emerged, mutated, and grown stronger. But as historical analysis shows, they have been ever-present concerns. This innovative and interdisciplinary collection of essays considers examples of monstrous children since the 16th century to the present, spanning real-life and popular culture, to exhibit the manifestation of the Western cultural anxiety around the problematic, anomalous child as naughty, dangerous, or just plain evil. The book takes an inter- and multidisciplinary approach, drawing upon fields as diverse as sociology, psychology, film, and literature, to study the role of the child and childhood within contemporary Western culture and to see the historic ways in which each discipline intersects and influences the other.
Download or read book The Monstrous Feminine written by Barbara Creed and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-11-02 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a timely update of a seminal text which re-interprets key films of the horror genre, including Carrie, The Exorcist, The Brood and Psycho. In the first edition, Creed draws on Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection to challenge the popular view that women in horror are almost always victims, and argues that patriarchal ideology constructs women as monstrous in relation to her sexuality and reproductive body to justify her subjugation. Although a projection of male fears and paranoid fantasies, the monstrous-feminine is nonetheless a terrifying figure. Creed’s argument contests Freudian and Lacanian theories of sexual difference to offer a provocative rereading of classical and contemporary horror. This updated edition includes a new section examining contemporary feminist horror films in relation to nonhuman theory. Creed proposes a new concept of radical abjection to reinterpret the monstrous-feminine as a figure who embraces abjection by reclaiming her body and re-defining her otherness as nonhuman – while questioning patriarchy, anthropocentrism, misogyny and the meaning of the human. Films discussed include Ginger Snaps, Teeth, Atlantics, The Girl with All the Gifts, Border and Titane. Barbara Creed’s classic remains as relevant as ever and this edition will be of interest to academics and students of feminist theory, nonhuman theory, critical animal studies, race, and queer theory.
Download or read book The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous written by Asa Simon Mittman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-02-24 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Nothing Natural Is Shameful written by Joan Cadden and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-09-17 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his Problemata, Aristotle provided medieval thinkers with the occasion to inquire into the natural causes of the sexual desires of men to act upon or be acted upon by other men, thus bringing human sexuality into the purview of natural philosophers, whose aim it was to explain the causes of objects and events in nature. With this philosophical justification, some late medieval intellectuals asked whether such dispositions might arise from anatomy or from the psychological processes of habit formation. As the fourteenth-century philosopher Walter Burley observed, "Nothing natural is shameful." The authors, scribes, and readers willing to "contemplate base things" never argued that they were not vile, but most did share the conviction that they could be explained. From the evidence that has survived in manuscripts of and related to the Problemata, two narratives emerge: a chronicle of the earnest attempts of medieval medical theorists and natural philosophers to understand the cause of homosexual desires and pleasures in terms of natural processes, and an ongoing debate as to whether the sciences were equipped or permitted to deal with such subjects at all. Mining hundreds of texts and deciphering commentaries, indices, abbreviations, and marginalia, Joan Cadden shows how European scholars deployed a standard set of philosophical tools and a variety of rhetorical strategies to produce scientific approaches to sodomy.
Download or read book Monsters and the Monstrous written by Niall Scott and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2007 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emerging from depths comes a series of papers dealing with one of the most significant creations that reflects on and critiques human existence. Both a warning and a demonstration, the monster as myth and metaphor provides an articulation of human imagination that toys with the permissible and impermissible. Monsters from zombies to cuddly cartoon characters, emerging from sewers, from pages of literature, propaganda posters, movies and heavy metal, all are covered in this challenging, scholarly collection. This volume the third in the series presents a marvellous collection of studies on the metaphor of the monster in literature, cinema, music, culture, philosophy, history and politics. Both historical reflection and concerns of our time are addressed with clarity and written in an accessible manner providing appeal for the scholar and lay reader alike. This eclectic collection will be of interest to academics and students working in a range of disciplines, such as cultural studies, film studies, political theory, philosophy and literature studies.
Download or read book Avenging Nature written by Eduardo Valls Oyarzun and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-09-28 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Nature, thou art my goddess”—Edmund’s bold assertion in King Lear could easily inspire and, at the same time, function as a lamentation of the inadequate respect of nature in culture. In this volume, international experts provide multidisciplinary exploration of the insubordinate representations of nature in modern and contemporary literature and art. The work foregrounds the need to reassess how nature is already, and has been for a while, striking back against human domination. From the perspective of literary studies, art, history, media studies, ethics and philosophy, and ethnology and anthropology, Avenging Nature highlights the need of assessing insurgent discourses that—converging with counter-discourses of race, gender or class—realize the empowerment of nature from its subaltern position. Acknowledging the argument that cultural representations of nature establish a relationship of domination and exploitation of human discourse over nonhuman reality and that, in consequence, our regard for nature as humanist critics is instrumental and anthropocentric, the present volume advocates for the view that the time has come to finally perceive nature’s vengeance and to critically probe into nature’s ongoing revenge against the exploitation of culture.
Download or read book Monstrous Bodies political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe written by Laura Lunger Knoppers and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Monstrous Imagination written by Marie-Hélène Huet and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What woeful maternal fancy produced such a monster? This was once the question asked when a deformed infant was born. From classical antiquity through to the Enlightenment, the monstrous child bore witness to the fearsome power of the mother's imagination. What such a notion meant and how it reappeared, transformed, in the Romantic period are the questions explored in this book, a study of theories linking imagination, art and monstrous progeny.
Download or read book The Monstrous Organization written by T. Thanem and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2011 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book marks a major shift in the way we think and feel about organizations. Radically reconsidering what we see as organizationally normal and abnormal, Thanem shatters the borders of convention to enable the becoming of a new and monstrously radical politics of difference. With reflexivity, sensitivity and courage, this politically and theoretically charged work offers an affirmative alternative to habituated organizational violence and oppression. It does so in the form of a monstrous ethics of organizations. Essential reading for those interested in the best of the latest advances in organization studies. Carl Rhodes, Swansea University, UK A beautifully expressed, wonderfully crafted object, transcending the idea of organization theory book ; this is a playfully serious and provocatively modest encounter with the monstrous we inhabit and the monsters we create with our work and everyday life. It made me laugh with embarrassment and cry with joy by prying open much that we, organizational scholars, often try to hide. Finally, our monstrosity was free to roam in the light of what we claim as knowledge! It felt very liberating. Marta B. Calás, University of Massachusetts, US Invited to experience becoming-monster as we get to exercise our norms as students of organizations, Thanem makes a case for the socio-corporeal ontology of organization. Disassembled by the generosity of the multitude, we are provided with an opportunity to learn to know our own particular heterogeneity, our styles of assembling ourselves to what we have become. Becoming is thereby learnt. Important lessons, both for analysts and practitioners of organizations. Daniel Hjorth, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark Drawing on contemporary debates in organization theory, this book explores the monsters that populate organizations, what organizations do to these monsters, and how this challenges us to re-construct organization theory. Torkild Thanem first interrogates how organizations and organization theory seek to kill monsters and how organizations exploit the monstrous for commercial purposes from the alien monsters of the sci-fi entertainment industry to the monstrous branding of energy drinks and the organic-synthetic chimeras produced by biotech and agribusiness companies. He then argues for more diverse, more joyful and more responsible organizations through a positively monstrous theory, politics and ethics of organizational life. Proposing a theory and ontology of organizations beyond poststructuralist constructionism and critical realism, The Monstrous Organization creatively addresses the history and theory of monsters in organizational life. It will appeal to scholars, doctoral students and master's students in management and organization studies, business ethics, diversity management, cultural studies, gender studies and sociology.
Download or read book Re reading the Monstrous Feminine written by Nicholas Chare and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a critical reappraisal of Barbara Creed’s ground-breaking work of feminist psychoanalytic film scholarship, The Monstrous-Feminine, which was first published in 1993. The Monstrous-Feminine married psychoanalytic thinking with film analysis in radically new ways to provide an invaluable corrective to conventional approaches to the study of women in horror films, with their narrow emphasis on woman’s victimhood. This volume, which will mark 25 years since the publication of The Monstrous-Feminine, brings together essays by international scholars working across a variety of disciplines who take up Creed’s ideas in new ways and fresh contexts or, more broadly, explore possible futures for feminist and/or psychoanalytically informed art history and film theory.
