Full Description
The Pathogenesis of Fear gathers together diverse conversations about cultural constructions of the monstrous. Interdisciplinary essays map the margins of monstrosity as follows: the cannibalistic paradox in Kleist's late-Romantic Penthesilea; intersections of the monstrous-feminine and the new Victorian psycho-physiology of consciousness in George Eliot's early novels; the monster-formed citizens of Dickensian and later dystopias; the killing of African Americans targeted as monstrous entities in US cities; the post-human anguish of a television zombie-world; the monstrous mutilations of a Spanish horror film; psychosocial aberration in Martin Millar's werewolf fiction; the demonization of the Other on the war-torn streets of Ireland; Derridean devouring sovereignty. Discursively correlated with different categories of body and mind, monstrosity, these essays argue, persists in taking many forms.
Contributors are Elizabeth Hollis Berry, Niculae Gheran, Sarah Harris, Fiona Harris-Ramsby and Mubarak Muhammad, Michaela Marková, Kimberley McMahon Coleman, Judith Rahn, Cindy Smith and Marita Vyrgioti.
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Elizabeth Hollis Berry
Part 1
Subjectivity and (Ab)use of Power
1 Devotion, Divergence and Desire: Anthropophagy as a Means of Cultural Formation
Judith Rahn
2 Devouring: Deconstructing Sovereignty's Omnipotence in Jacques Derrida's Seminar 'The Beast and the Sovereign'
Marita Vyrgioti
3 The Monster Factory: Monsterisation of Characters in Dystopias
Niculae Liviu Gheran
4 'She Could Devour Him If She Wanted to': Hunger, Scopophilia, and Power in The Skin I Live In
Sarah D. Harris
5 Warning! Monster Metaphors and the Urban Black Body
Fiona Harris-Ramsby and Mubarak Muhammad
Part 2
Agency and Selfdom
6 Victorian Psychology, Monstrous Maidens, and George Eliot
Elizabeth Hollis Berry
7 (De)Construction of the Monstrous in Contemporary Northern Irish Fiction
Michaela Marková
8 Adolescence as Battleground for Identity Foundation: Martin Millar's Wolf Girl Novels 149
Kimberley McMahon-Coleman
9 In The Flesh and the Administration of Posthuman Anguish
Cindy Smith
