Monster Culture in the 21st Century

A Reader

Online Access / Resources

Monster Culture in the 21st Century

A Reader

Online Access / Resources

Ebook (Epub & Mobi) ₹4399.00 Ebook (PDF) ₹4399.00

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Description

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.

Introduction: Toward a Comprehensive Monster Theory in the 21st Century by Marina Levina and Diem My Bui
1. Ontology and Monstrosity by Amit S. Rai

Part I: Monstrous Identities
2. Heading Towards the Past: The Twilight Vampire Figure as Surveillance Metaphor by Florian Grandena
3. Playing Alien in Post-Racial Times by Susana Loza
4. Battling Monsters and Becoming Monstrous: Human Devolution in The Walking Dead by Kyle W. Bishop
5. The Monster in the Mirror: Reflecting and Deflecting the Mobility of Gendered Violence Onscreen by Megan Foley
6. Intersectionality Bites: Metaphors of Race and Sexuality in HBO's True Blood by Peter Campbell
7. Gendering the Monster Within: Biological Essentialism, Sexual Difference, and Changing Symbolic Functions of the Monster in Popular Werewolf Texts by Rosalind Sibielski

Part II: Monstrous Technologies
8. Abject Posthumanism: Neoliberalism, Biopolitics and Zombies by Sherryl Vint
9. Monstrous Technologies and the Telepathology of Everyday Life by Jeremy Biles
10. Monstrous Citizenships: Coercion, Submission, and the Possibilities of Resistance in Never Let Me Go and Cloud Atlas by Roy Osamu Kamada
11. On the Frontlines of the Zombie War in the Congo: Digital Technology, the Trade in Conflict Minerals, and Zombification by Jeffrey W. Mantz
12. Monsters by the Numbers: Controlling Monstrosity in Video Games by Jaroslav Švelch
13. Killing Whiteness:The Critical Positioning of Zombie Walk Brides in Internet Settings by Michele White

Part III: Monstrous Territories
14. Zombinations: Reading the undead as debt and guilt in the national imaginary by Michael S. Drake
15. The Monster Within: Post-9/11 Narratives of Threat and the U.S. Shifting Terrain of Terror by Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo and Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo
16. The Heartland Under Siege: Undead in the West by Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper
17. When Matter Becomes an Active Agent: The Incorporeal Monstrosity of Threat in Lost by Enrica Picarelli
18. Monstrous Capital: Frankenstein Derivatives, Financial Wizards, and the Spectral Economy by Ryan Gillespie
19. Domesticating the Monstrous in the Globalizing World by Carolyn Harford
About the Contributors
Index

Product details

Published	23 May 2013
Format	Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition	1st
Pages	344
ISBN	9781441185372
Imprint	Bloomsbury Academic
Illustrations	20
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

The essays in this new edited collection are . . . designed to address how monstrosity has come to represent the fears that the new century has brought with it. [...] The book does itself an injustice by calling itself a "reader" when, in fact, it is more than just a collection of articles bundled together . . . The editors have clearly worked hard to present a collection of essays in such a way that the book has a through-narrative, and for that they should be congratulated.

Shane Brown, University of East Anglia, UK, Cinema Journal
Preoccupied with zombies, vampires, and ever more unholy configurations of human body parts and consciousnesses, the 21st century is proving to be a monstrous time. Monster Culture in the 21st Century offers readers an international and interdisciplinary theoretical toolkit that can help us better understand the monstrous' magical ability to reflect and refract immense political, technoscientific, and ecological changes and anxieties.

Carol A. Stabile, Professor, School of Journalism and Communication and Department of Women's and Gender Studies, University of Oregon, US
Monster Culture in the 21st Century brings together various theoretical and methodological approaches to look critically at the trope of the monstrous as an increasingly ubiquitous mode for managing contemporary crises of identity, technology and globalization through popular media culture. As such it provides refreshing new directions for understanding 'monster culture' beyond metaphor and as a necessary condition of our lives in the 21st century.

Dr. Jane Chi Hyun Park, Senior Lecturer, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies and the United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney, Australia
Monster Culture in the 21st Century stands out prominently among the wave of . . . new post-millennial studies . . . [It] succeeds as both a research guide and a classroom tool, in large part due to its expansive scope and, yet also, the unusual particular care given to its myriad topics

John Edgar Browning, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, Information, Communication and Society