This chapter deals with a rarity in Romantic literature: the sublime body. While landscapes tended to be seen as sublime, as outpourings of ever-growing philosophical minds, bodies were more often than not belittled and considered as insignificant husks. While eighteenth-century literature introduced the priapistic sublime into erotic novels, thus juxtaposing demure sentimentality with the burlesque gigantism of the homme machine’s genitals, Romantic poets opened “workshop[s] of filthy creation” where philosophical minds seem to unleash bodies that combine the sublime with the monstrous. Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, thus, impregnated by the sexualized voices of his Ingolstadt professors, gives birth to a grotesque abortion, whereas a generation before Matthew Gregory Lewis had shown what happens when an abbot’s mind loses control and – in an unparalleled example of Romantic hagio-porn – transforms a Madonna lactans into a Mephistophelean abettor to the devil. Byron even goes a step further when he imagines man’s existence as a voyage on a gargantuan female body, constantly threatened by the jaws of a vagina dentata.

Writing his contributions to Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique des Deux Indes, Diderot developed a peculiar perspective on how to rethink human society according to the ideals of the Enlightenment. The histories of the European conquest of the world unveiled a cultural energy that displayed the contradictory impulses of cruel desire for domination and benevolence. Ferocity and humanity sprang from the same physical constitution of mankind. However human history, like natural history, was not uniform. Monstrous anomalies could not, and were not, ignored, but had to be interpreted through the philosophical language of reason and historical experience. The European colonial conquests in fact showed four types of social monstrosity in action. The first tree, familiar from the example of the Spanish empire, were cruelty, greed and religion. Despotism was the fourth and most insidious category of monstrosity, because both the despots and their subjects lost their humanity. Philosophical history, nonetheless, also offered a glimpse of what a rational society could be like, by revealing the true roots of the natural, civil and religious codes. The cosmopolitan ideal corresponded to a natural code that offered the principles of pity and natural right through which a free society might be founded, one where the mutual relationship between morals and politics could be re-established on more rational grounds.

This chapter examines the way two related genres, science fiction (SF) and the weird, deploy horror to critique the sources and expressions of “American horror” – namely, the dark side of American exceptionalism and the social and environmental consequences of its imperialist projects. The two genres share similar generic genealogies, but they diverge teleologically. SF is built on the assumptions of scientific rationalism and therefore follows an identifiable internal logic, relying on our implicit or explicit belief in the plausibility of the story. The weird, by contrast, is resolutely committed to the inexplicable. Both, however, use horror to disrupt our reliance on realist modes of representation that flatter our epistemological certainties. As such, both SF and the weird have been platforms for colonialist and nationalist imaginations, but both have also been potent vehicles for revealing, resisting, and repairing the brutalities of such imaginations.

Although a major Irish-language poet, Biddy Jenkinson is perhaps best known for forbidding the translation of her work into English, calling her decision ‘a small rude gesture to those who think that everything can be harvested and stored without loss in an English-speaking Ireland’. Yet the picture that emerges from her work is anything but that of a Gaelic puritan. Jenkinson’s world is not one of loss and lamentation for a vanished past, but of vibrant immersion in mythopoeia of sex, myth, and monstrosity. In her work on County Wicklow, where she has long been resident, she excavates colonial history, exploring the points of connection between the colonial Pale and its wild Gaelic Other. In her work on the cannibal hag figure Mis, she vividly recuperates feminine monstrosity as a poetic force to be reckoned with. The linguistic energy of Jenkinson’s work combined with the obscurity it inhabits, as difficult and scholarly work (though often very funny too), makes her an exemplary representative of the submerged Gaelic bardic tradition.

Griselda has always challenged the status of the human, even though critics have long sought to elucidate prized human characteristics through her behavior as wife, mother, and political subject. Despite these efforts, our moral investments in Griselda - quite literally, the ways we have sought to associate her with a host of social and moral prescriptions concerning subjectivity, femininity, maternity, and sovereignty - are confounded by her unyielding submission. Griselda is unfeeling, but she gains a horrible autonomy that critiques patriarchal tyranny. Griselda affirms women’s material investment in the household, but to do so she sacrifices all ethical bonds outside those mandated by her pre-marital pact with Walter. Griselda is transcendent, but she is alienated from a common humanity, much less Christianity. This chapter argues that Griselda is not an inhuman monster; rather, through The Clerk’s Tale, Chaucer imagines a different view of humanity, one engendered according to modes of virtue typically associated with women, including patience, pity, humility, steadfastness, and submission.

This chapter explores how Charles Darwin’s ideas about structural and functional anomalies in plants, animals and humans inspired the new Gothic monsters to be found in the work of Grant Allen, H. G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker and Arthur Machen. It traces the ways in which these writers reimagined human genealogies in light of evolutionary biology, materialism and Darwinist criminal anthropology. Sadistic criminals whose degenerate minds and bodies threatened civilised society, and atavistic flesh-eating plants whose natural ‘criminality’ was coaxed out by sadistic experimental scientists, are part of a significant reimagining of both biological and cultural history in the last half of the century. Indeed, through these types of biological monsters, Gothic writers challenged some of the most cherished ideas that Victorians held about their cultural heritage. Knowledge about human descent, the biology of human and animal abnormality, and criminal compulsions that dwelt in the ‘protoplasm’, largely negated the ideals of the age of chivalry – the medieval origins of the higher-order values that supposedly defined the human as exceptional.