Oxford University Press (2009)
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Abstract |
Hailed as "a feast" (Washington Post) and "a modern-day bestiary" (The New Yorker), 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. Beginning at the time of Alexander the Great, the monsters come fast and furious--Behemoth and Leviathan, Gog and Magog, 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 beyond the safe enclosures of rational thought. Exploring sources as diverse as philosophical treatises, scientific notebooks, and novels, Asma unravels 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.
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Keywords | monsters philosophy of culture history of science psychology horror |
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Reprint years | 2011 |
Buy this book | $23.00 from Amazon (11% off) Amazon page |
ISBN(s) | 0199798095 019533616X 9780195336160 9780199798094 |
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Citations of this work BETA
Uncanny Sociocultural Categories.Jordan R. Schoenherr & Tyler J. Burleigh - 2014 - Frontiers in Psychology 5.
"Monsters on the Brain: An Evolutionary Epistemology of Horror".Stephen Asma - 2014 - Social Research: An International Quarterly (N.4).
“We Can Rebuild Him!”: The Essentialisation of the Human/Cyborg Interface in the Twenty-First Century, or Whatever Happened to The Six Million Dollar Man? [REVIEW]Simon Bacon - 2013 - AI and Society 28 (3):267-276.
Spirit in the Materialist World: On the Structure of Regard.John Ó Maoilearca - 2014 - Angelaki 19 (1):13-29.
Monstrous Body: Between Alienness and Ownness.Anna Alichniewicz - 2021 - Argument: Biannual Philosophical Journal 11 (2):403-414.
View all 6 citations / Add more citations
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