Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to American Horror
- The Cambridge Companion to American Horror
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Histories
- Part II Genres
- 7 Body Horror
- 8 Queer Horror
- 9 Folk Horror
- 10 Occult Horror
- 11 SF and the Weird
- 12 Monsters and Monstrosity
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
- References
12 - Monsters and Monstrosity
from Part II - Genres
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 July 2022
By
Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to American Horror
- The Cambridge Companion to American Horror
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Histories
- Part II Genres
- 7 Body Horror
- 8 Queer Horror
- 9 Folk Horror
- 10 Occult Horror
- 11 SF and the Weird
- 12 Monsters and Monstrosity
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
- References
Summary
This chapter maps out the central paradigms for conceptualizing the monsters of American horror, marking their inextricability from politics and moving toward identifying the principal forms of monstrosity in the early twenty-first century. Monstrosity has been defined as impure and abject, existing on borders, not categorizable; the incarnation of “otherness,” typically racial, gendered, sexual, or class; and a terrifying reflection of the “self,” as the monster has increasingly become an avatar of “normality” rather than what threatens it, embodying dominant rather than marginalized social structures and ideologies. Most recently, monsters are being generated by scientific explorations that insist on the thoroughgoing entanglement of life, the ways in which the “human” is not singular, not exceptional, but rather symbiotically entwined with nonhuman life. This form of horror is adeptly exploited in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s 2020 novel Mexican Gothic, about an entangled fungus and a colonial family.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to American Horror , pp. 183 - 198Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022
References
Works Cited
Asma, Stephen T. On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. Oxford University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Brooks, Kinitra D. Searching for Sycorax: Black Women and Horror. Rutgers University Press, 2017.Google Scholar
Calafell, Bernadette Marie. Monstrosity, Performance, and Race in Contemporary Culture. Peter Lang, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” In Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 3–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crane, Stephen. “The Monster.” In The Portable Stephen Crane, ed. Katz, Joseph. Penguin, 1969. 449–508.Google Scholar
Creed, Barbara. “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection.” In The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Grant, Barry Keith. University of Texas Press, 1996. 35–65.Google Scholar
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. “The Lynching of Jube Benson.” In The Heart of Happy Hollow. Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1904.Google Scholar
Goddu, Teresa A. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. Columbia University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Goodall, Reece. “John Kramer for President: The Rise of Authoritarian Horror.” Horror Studies 11, no. 1 (2020): 123–40.Google Scholar
Grant, Barry Keith, ed. The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. University of Texas Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Halberstam, Jack. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Hall, Donald D. The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History. 1968. Duke University Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Hardt, Michael, and Negri, Antonio. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Penguin, 2004.Google Scholar
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Young Goodman Brown.” 1935. In Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tales and Sketches. Library of America, 1996. 276–89.Google Scholar
Ingebretsen, Edward J. At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture. University of Chicago Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Keetley, Dawn. “Introduction: Six Theses on Plant Horror.” In Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film, ed. Keetley, Dawn and Tenga, Angela. Palgrave, 2016. 1–30.Google Scholar
Keetley, Dawn. “Lock Her Up! Angry Men and the Captive Woman in Post-Recession Horror.” In Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of Fear, ed. McCollum, Victoria. Routledge, 2019. 97–118.Google Scholar
Keetley, Dawn. Making a Monster: Jesse Pomeroy, the Boy Murderer of 1870s Boston. University of Massachusetts Press, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lincoln, Abraham. “First Inaugural Address.” March 4, 1861. The Avalon Project, Yale Law School, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln1.asp. Accessed September 24, 2020.Google Scholar
Lovecraft, H. P. “The Outsider.” 1926. In H. P. Lovecraft: Tales. Library of America, 2005. 8–14.Google Scholar
Luckhurst, Roger. “After Monster Theory? Gareth Edwards’ Monsters.” Science Fiction Film and Television 13 (2020): 269–90.Google Scholar
McFall-Ngai, Margaret. “Noticing Microbial Worlds: The Postmodern Synthesis in Biology.” In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Monsters of the Anthropocene, ed. Tsing, Anna et al. University of Minnesota Press, 2017. M51–M69.Google Scholar
Means Coleman, Robin R. Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present. Routledge, 2011.Google Scholar
Mittman, Asa Simon. “Introduction: The Impact of Monsters and Monster Studies.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Mittman, Asa Simon and Dendle, Peter. Ashgate, 2012. 1–14.Google Scholar
Murphy, Bernice M. The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness. Palgrave, 2013.Google Scholar
Poole, W. Scott. Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting. Baylor University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Schutte, Anne Jacobson. “‘Such Monstrous Births’: A Neglected Aspect of the Antinomian Controversy.” Renaissance Quarterly 38, no. 1 (1985): 85–106.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shapiro, Stephen. “Speculative Nostalgia and Media of the New Intersectional Left: My Favorite Thing Is Monsters.” In The Novel as Network: Forms, Ideas, Commodities, ed. Lanzendörfer, Tim and Norrick-Rühl, Corinna. Palgrave, 2020. 119–36.Google Scholar
Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures. Random House, 2020.Google Scholar
Shildrick, Margrit. “You Are There, Like My Skin: Reconfiguring Relation Economies.” In Thinking through the Skin, ed. Ahmed, Sara and Stacey, Jackie, Routledge, 2001. 160–73.Google Scholar
Swanson, Heather, et al. “Introduction: Bodies Tumbled into Bodies.” In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Monsters of the Anthropocene, ed. Tsing, Anna et al. University of Minnesota Press, 2017. M1–M12.Google Scholar
Tsing, Anna, et al., eds. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Monsters of the Anthropocene. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.Google Scholar
Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. “American Monsters.” In A Companion to American Gothic, ed. Crow, Charles L.. John Wiley, 2014. 41–55.Google Scholar
Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. “Introduction: A Genealogy of Monster Theory.” In The Monster Theory Reader, ed. Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. University of Minnesota Press, 2020. 1–36.Google Scholar
Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, ed. The Monster Theory Reader. University of Minnesota Press, 2020.Google Scholar
Wilson, Natalie. Willful Monstrosity: Gender and Race in 21st Century Horror. McFarland, 2020.Google Scholar
Winsser, Johan. “Mary Dyer and the ‘Monster’ Story.” Quaker History 79, no. 1 (1990): 20–34.Google Scholar