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Monsters have taken many forms across time and cultures, yet within these variations, monsters often evoke the same paradoxical response: disgust and desire. We simultaneously fear monsters and take pleasure in seeing them, and their role in human culture helps to explain this apparent contradiction. Monsters are created in order to delineate where the acceptable boundaries of action and emotion exist. However, while killing the monster allows us to cast out socially unacceptable desires, the prevalence of monsters in both history and fiction reveals humanity’s desire to see and experience the forbidden. We seek, write about, and display monsters as both a warning and wish fulfilment, and monsters, therefore, reveal that the line between desire and disgust is often thin. Looking across genres, subjects, and periods, this book examines what our conflicted reaction to the monster tells us about human culture.
Kristen Wright is a PhD Candidate at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Her research interests include Renaissance drama and poetry, monsters, folklore, and travel literature.
IntroductionKristen D. Wright Part I: Searching for MonstersHow Ignorance Made a Monster, Or: Writing the History of Vlad the Impaler without the Use of Sources Leads to 20,000 Impaled TurksPeter Mario KreuterUnveiling the Truth through Testimony: The Argentinean Dirty WarAdriana SpahrFanatics and Absolutists: Communist Monsters in John le Carré’s Cold War FictionToby ManningPart II: Desiring the MonstrousQueer Race Play: Kinky Sex and the Trauma of RacismDejan KuzmanovicAbsolute Beasts? Social Mechanics of Achieved MonstrosityWilliam RedwoodPart III: Writing MonstersUtopian Leprosy: Transforming Gender in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and History in the Strugatsky Brothers’ The Ugly SwansElsa BouetMonstrosity and the Fantastic: The Threats and Promises of Monsters in Tommaso Landolfi’s FictionIrene BullaPart IV: Gazing at Monsters‘This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine’: Man's Monstrous Potential in The Tempest and TitusAndronicus Kristen D. WrightPaedophilic Productions and Gothic Performances: Contending with Monstrous IdentityJen BakerCreeper Bogeyman: Cultural Narratives of Gay as MonstrousSergio Fernando JuárezFull Metal Abs: The Obscene Spartan Supplement of Liberal DemocracyCarlo Comanducci
