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"In the past decade, our rapidly changing world faced terrorism, global epidemics, economic and social strife, new communication technologies, immigration, and climate change to name a few. These fears and tensions reflect an evermore-interconnected global environment where increased mobility of people, technologies, and disease have produced great social, political, and economical uncertainty. The essays in this collection examine how monstrosity has been used to manage these rising fears and tensions. Analyzing popular films and televisions shows, such as True Blood, Twilight, Paranormal Activity, District 9, Battlestar Galactica, and Avatar, it argues that monstrous narratives of the past decade have become omnipresent specifically because they represent collective social anxieties over resisting and embracing change in the 21st century. The first comprehensive text that uses monstrosity not just as a metaphor for change, but rather a necessary condition through which change is lived and experienced in the 21st century, this approach introduces a different perspective toward the study of monstrosity in culture."-- Machine generated contents note: -- Introduction: Toward a Comprehensive Monster Theory in the 21st Century -- Marina Levina and Diem My Bui 1. Ontology and Monstrosity -- Amit S. Rai; Part One: Monstrous Identities 2. Heading Toward the Past: The Twilight Vampire Figure as Surveillance Metaphor -- Florian Grandena 3. Playing Alien in Post-Racial Times -- Susana Loza 4. Battling Monsters and Becoming Monstrous: Human Devolution in The Walking Dead -- Kyle W. Bishop 5. The Monster in the Mirror: Reflecting and Deflecting the Mobility of Gendered Violence Onscreen -- Megan Foley 6. Intersectionality Bites: Metaphors of Race and Sexuality in HBO's True Blood -- Peter Odell Campbell 7. Gendering the Monster Within: Biological Essentialism, Sexual Difference, and Changing Symbolic Functions of the Monster in Popular Werewolf Texts -- Rosalind Sibielski; Part Two: Monstrous Technologies 8. Abject Posthumanism: Neoliberalism, Biopolitics and Zombies -- Sherryl Vint 9. Monstrous Technologies and the Telepathology of Everyday Life -- Jeremy Biles 10. Monstrous Citizenships: Coercion, Submission, and the Possibilities of Resistance in Never Let Me Go and Cloud Atlas -- Roy Osamu Kamada 11. On the Frontlines of the Zombie War in the Congo: Digital Technology, the Trade in Conflict Minerals, and Zombification -- Jeffrey W. Mantz 12. Monsters by the Numbers: Controlling Monstrosity in Video Games -- Jaroslav Švelch 13. Killing Whiteness:The Critical Positioning of Zombie Walk Brides in Internet Settings -- Michele White; Part Three : Monstrous Territories 14. Zombinations: Reading the undead as debt and guilt in the national imaginary -- Michael S. Drake 15. The Monster Within: Post-9/11 Narratives of Threat and the U.S. Shifting Terrain of Terror -- Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo and Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo 16. The Heartland Under Siege: Undead in the West -- Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper 17. When Matter Becomes an Active Agent: The Incorporeal Monstrosity of Threat in Lost -- Enrica Picarelli 18. Monstrous Capital: Frankenstein Derivatives, Financial Wizards, and the Spectral Economy -- Ryan Gillespie19. Domesticating the Monstrous in a Globalizing World -- Carolyn Harford; Index.
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