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Contents; Preface: In a Time of Monsters; I. Monster Theory; 1. Monster Culture (Seven Theses); 2. Beowulf as Palimpsest; 3. Monstrosity, Illegibility, Denegation: De Man, bp Nichol, and the Resistance to Postmodernism; II. Monstrous Identity; 4. The Odd Couple: Gargantua and Tom Thumb; 5. America's "United Siamese Brothers": Chang and Eng and Nineteenth-Century Ideologies of Democracy and Domesticity; 6. Liberty, Equality, Monstrosity: Revolutionizing the Family in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; III. Monstrous Inquiry; 7. "No Monsters at the Resurrection": Inside Some Conjoined Twins 8. Representing the Monster: Cognition, Cripples, and Other Limp Parts in Montaigne's "Des Boyteux"9. Hermaphrodites Newly Discovered: The Cultural Monsters of Sixteenth-Century France; 10. Anthropometamorphosis: John Bulwer's Monsters of Cosmetology and the Science of Culture; IV. Monstrous History; 11. Vampire Culture; 12. The Alien and Alienated as Unquiet Dead in the Sagas of the Icelanders; 13. Unthinking the Monster: Twelfth-Century Responses to Saracen Alterity; 14. Dinosaurs-R-Us: The (Un)Natural History of Jurassic Park; Contributors; Index; A; B; C; D; E; F; G; H; I; J; K; L; M; N OP; R; S; T; U; V; W; Y We live in a time of monsters. Monsters provide a key to understanding the culture that spawned them. So argue the essays in this wide-ranging and fascinating collection that asks the question, What happens when critical theorists take the study of monsters seriously as a means of examining our culture? In viewing the monstrous body as a metaphor for the cultural body, the contributors to Monster Theory consider beasts, demons, freaks, and fiends as symbolic expressions of cultural unease that pervade a society and shape its collective behavior. Through a historical sampling of monsters, these essays argue that our fascination for the monstrous testifies to our continued desire to explore difference and prohibition.Contributors: Mary Baine Campbell, Brandeis U; David L. Clark, McMaster U; Frank Grady, U of Missouri, St. Louis; David A. Hedrich Hirsch, U of Illinois; Lawrence D. Kritzman, Dartmouth College; Kathleen Perry Long, Cornell U; Stephen Pender; Allison Pingree, Harvard U; Anne Lake Prescott, Barnard College; John O'Neill, York U; William Sayers, George Washington U; Michael Uebel, U of Virginia; Ruth Waterhouse
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