| Formatted Contents Note: |
Introduction : extraordinary beings -- Phobias -- Repulsion and attraction -- Inhuman -- Unthinkable -- Unmanageable -- The literal and the symbolic -- pt. 1. Ancient monsters -- 1. Alexander fights monsters in India -- Embellishing -- Manliness -- 2. Monsters are nature's playthings -- Griffins -- Monstrous bones -- Natural history and credulity -- Monstrous races -- 3. Hermaphrodites and man-headed oxen -- In-between beings -- Reason and superstition -- Aristotle's monsters -- Phantom images -- 4. Monstrous desire -- Plato's monster -- Monstrous mother -- pt. 2. Medieval monsters : messages from God -- 5. Biblical monsters -- God's lackeys -- The Apocalypse -- Giants -- 6. Do monsters have souls? -- Monsters and a creator god -- Baptizing the monstrous races -- The descent of monsters -- Alexander's gates -- 7. The monster killer -- "I have known much peril" -- Tolkien's tragic Beowulf -- 8. Possessing demons and witches -- St. Anthony fights the demons -- Witches -- The witch hunter -- Illusion or reality? -- Monstrous desires revisited -- Driving out the demons -- pt. 3. Scientific monsters : the book of nature is riddled with typos -- 9. Natural history, freaks, and nondescripts -- The Hydra -- Eradicating the fantastic -- Responding to the marvelous -- A mischievous taxidermist -- Freaks -- 10. The medicalization of monsters -- Monstrous births -- Pregnant women should not look upon monsters -- Monsters and the mechanization of nature -- Frankenstein -- John Hunter's monsters -- Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire's teratology -- William Lawrence and the headless children -- 11. Darwin's mutants -- Monsters and transmutation -- No monstrous jumps in nature -- Mutationism and hopeful monsters -- Alberch, Gould, and the return of the monsters -- Evo-devo -- pt. 4. Inner monsters : the psychological aspects -- 12. The art of human vulnerability : angst and horror -- Fear and cognitive mismatch -- Angst and fear -- Freud -- Torture porn -- Creeping flesh -- 13. Criminal monsters : psychopathology, aggression, and the malignant heart -- Monsters in the headlines -- Leopold and Loeb -- Rage and aggression -- Monstrous desire revisited -- Cold detachment -- The causes of psychopathology -- Judging and managing the monsters -- pt. V. Monsters today and tomorrow -- 14. Torturers, terrorists, and zombies : the products of monstrous societies -- Xenophobia and race -- Theoretical xenophobia -- Instinctual xenophobia -- Monstrous civilizations -- Pathological societies -- Monsters from the oppressed classes -- Monsters of ideology -- Deconstructing monsters -- 15. Future monsters : robots, mutants, and posthuman cyborgs -- Mutants and robots -- Cyborgs -- Disembodied minds -- Playing God : biotechnology -- Are monsters in the eye of the beholder? -- Epilogue. |
| Summary, etc.: |
"Monsters. Real or imagined, literal or metaphorical, they have exerted a dread fascination on the human mind for many centuries. They attract and repel us, intrigue and terrify us, and in the process reveal something deeply important about the darker recesses of our collective psyche. Stephen Asma's On Monsters is a wide-ranging cultural and conceptual history of monsters--how they have evolved over time, what functions they have served for us, and what shapes they are likely to take in the future. Asma begins with a letter from Alexander the Great in 326 B.C. detailing an encounter in India with an "enormous beast--larger than an elephant with three ominous horns on its forehead." From there the monsters come fast and furious--Behemoth and Leviathan, Gog and Magog, the leopard-bear-lion beast of Revelation, Satan and his demons, Grendel and Frankenstein, circus freaks and headless children, right up to the serial killers and terrorists of today and the post-human cyborgs of tomorrow. Monsters embody our deepest anxieties and vulnerabilities, Asma argues, but they also symbolize the mysterious and incoherent territory just beyond the safe enclosures of rational thought. Exploring philosophical treatises, theological tracts, newspapers, pamphlets, films, scientific notebooks, and novels, Asma unpacks traditional monster stories for the clues they offer about the inner logic of an era's fears and fascinations. In doing so, he illuminates the many ways monsters have become repositories for those human qualities that must be repudiated, externalized, and defeated. Asma suggests that how we handle monsters reflects how we handle uncertainty, ambiguity, insecurity. And in a world that is daily becoming less secure and more ambiguous, he shows how we might learn to better live with monsters--and thereby avoid becoming one."--Publisher's website. |
Book
