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- Primary Sources on Monsters
Primary Sources on Monsters
Edited by Asa Simon Mittman and Marcus Hensel
Series: Arc Reference
364 Pages, Trim size: 210 x 260 mm
- Hardcover
- 9781942401216
- Published: July 2018
$220.00
£183.00
- Paperback
- 9781641894289
- Published: April 2020
$39.95
£29.50
This volume and its companion gather a wide range of readings and sources to enable us to see and understand what monsters show us about what it means to be human. The first volume introduces important modern theorists of the monstrous, with a brief introduction to each reading, setting the theorist and theory in context, and providing background and guiding questions. The selection of readings in Classic Readings on Monster Theory is intended to provide interpretive tools and strategies to use to grapple with the primary sources in the second volume - Primary Sources on Monsters - which brings together some of the most influential and indicative monster narratives from the West.
Taken together, these volumes allow us to witness the consistent, multi-millennium strategies the West has articulated, weaponized, and deployed to exclude, disempower, and dehumanize a range of groups and individuals within and without its porous boundaries.
1. The Battle of Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and Humbaba, from The Epic of Gilgamesh
2. The Nephilim, Goliath, Behemoth and Leviathan, and The Beasts of the Apocalypse, from the Bible
3. Selections from Theogony by Hesiod
4. Odysseus and His Men Encounter the Cyclops, from The Odyssey by Homer
5. Bust of Polyphemus
6. Monstrous Peoples and Beasts, from The Natural History by Pliny the Elder
7. Lycaon and Cadmus, from Metamorphoses by Ovid
8. Selections from City of God by St. Augustine of Hippo
9. The Táin Bó Cúailnge (Cattle Raid of Cooley)
10. Wonders of the East
11. Illuminations of the Donestre, Huntress, and Boar-Tusked Women from Wonders of the East
12. Introduction, Fight with Grendel, the Attack by Grendel's Mother, Fight with Grendel's Mother, and Fight with the Dragon, from Beowulf
13. Modern Images of Grendel by J. H. Frederick Bacon, Julio Castro, Leonard Baskin, and Gareth Hinds
14. Bisclavret by Marie de France
15. Völsunga saga (Saga of the Volsungs)
16. The Life of St. Christopher
17. Illumination of Saint Christopher
18. The Alliterative Morte Arthure
19. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
20. On Monsters by Ambroise Paré
21. Illustrations of Figure of a Foal with a Human Head; Portrait of a Marvelous Monster; Example of Too Large a Quantity of Semen; Figure of two twin girls, joined together by the posterior parts; Figure of a man from whose belly another man issued, from Ambroise Paré, On Monsters
22. Selections from The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser
23. Selections from The Tempest by William Shakespeare
24. Images of Caliban by John Hamilton Mortimer and Charles A. Buchel
25. A Discourse Concerning Prodigies: Wherein the Vanity of Presages by them is Reprehended, and their True and Proper Ends are Indicated by John Spencer
26. Selections from Paradise Lost by John Milton
27. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
28. Frontispiece to Frankenstein by Theodor Richard Edward von Holst
29. "William Wilson" by Edgar Allan Poe
30. "Goblin Market" by Christina Rossetti
31. Illustration of Buy From Us With Golden Curl engraved by Charles Faulkner after design by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
32. "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll
33. Illustration of Jabberwocky by John Tenniel
34. "The Damned Thing" by Ambrose Bierce
35. Selections from Dracula by Bram Stoker
36. Frontispiece to Bram Stoker, Dracula by "Nathan"
37. "Ancient Sorceries" by Algernon Blackwood
38. "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft
39. Sketch of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft
40. "Shambleau" by C.L. Moore
41. Trolls and Smaug, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien
42. "It" by Theodore Sturgeon
43. "Fever Dream" by Ray Bradbury
44. "The Faceless Thing" by Edward D. Hoch
45. Selections from Grendel by John Gardner
46. "Secret Observations on the Goat-Girl" by Joyce Carol Oates
47. Selections from Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
48. Slender Man
49. SCP (Special Containment Procedures) Foundation
Asa Simon Mittman is Professor and Chair of Art & Art History at California State University, Chico.
Marcus Hensel is Assistant Professor of English at Bethany College, Kansas.
The sections of this source reader are organized in chronological order from Western antiquity to the 21st century. Spanning a stretch of over 4000 years, the collection begins with The Epic of Gilgamesh (circa 2000 BCE) and ends with contemporary monster fictions circulated online. [...] Mittman and Hensel have assembled an essential source reader in the field with a necessary range of texts. With the vast timespan of the volume’s entries, in no way could this source accommodate a fully comprehensive collection of monsters in lore, myth, and literature. However, major developments and defining works of Western monster culture are represented through the selections in Primary Sources on Monsters.
~Madalynn L. Madigar, Limina 28, no. 2 (2023): 81-82
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