All Around Monstrous: Monster Media in Their Historical Contexts

We know all kinds of monsters. Vampires who suck human blood, werewolves who harass tourists in London or Paris, zombies who long to feast on our brains, or Godzilla, who is famous in and outside of Japan for destroying whole cities at once. Regardless of their monstrosity, all of these creatures are figments of the human mind and as real as they may seem, monsters are and always have been constructed by human beings. In other words, they are imagined. How they are imagined, however, depends on many different aspects and changes throughout history. The present volume provides an insight into the construction of monstrosity in different kinds of media, including literature, film, and TV series. It will show how and by whom monsters are really created, how time changes the perception of monsters and what characterizes specific monstrosities in their specific historical contexts. The book will provide valuable insights for scholars in different fields, whose interest focuses on either media studies or history.

Introduction: All Around Monstrous or a Critical Insight into Human-Monster Relations
Frank Jacob and Verena Bernardi

Chapter 1 Two Sides of the Same Coin: Witches, Class, Gender, and Modernity in Jeannette Winterson’s The Daylight Gate
Jessica Doble

Chapter 2 From Deadly to Dead Friendly: The Acculturation of the Vampire in Young Children’s Literature of the 1970s and 80s
Simon Bacon

Chapter 3 Conflict and Complexity: Humanist and Spiritualist Discourses in Anne Rice’s The Vampire Armand
Svetlana Seibel

Chapter 4 From Revulsion to Revival: Representation and Reception of Monstrosity in Tod Browning’s Freaks
Stephanie Flint

Chapter 5 On weres waestmum – In the Form of a Man: Grendel’s Changing Form in Film Adaptations
Almudena Nido

Chapter 6 Moonlight and Silver Bullets: Twentieth Century Racial Purity in Werewolf Films
Octavia Cade

Chapter 7 Romance as a Panacea and a New Generation of Intellectual Zombies in Warm Bodies and iZombie
Tatiana Prorokova

Chapter 8 Noble Savages, Magical Negroes, and Exotic Others, Oh My!: Black Female Vampires in Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2
Kendra R. Parker

Chapter 9 “One Big Happy Frankenstein Family” – The Originals: From Monstrous Patriarchy to Unruly Modern Family
Verena Bernardi

Chapter 10 From Tokyo’s Destroyer to International Icon: Godzilla and Japanese Monstrosity in the Postwar Age
Frank Jacob

Chapter 11 Music to Save an Audience: Two Melodramatic Vampires of 1820 and the Music that Betrays Them
Ryan D. Whittington

Contributors

Index

Verena Bernardi is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of English and American Studies at Saarland University, Germany. She holds a PhD in North American Cultural Studies and is the author of Us versus Them, or We? Post-2000 Vampiric Reflections of Family, Home and Hospitality in True Blood and The Originals. She has published in The Journal of Media and Movie Studies and LETTING THE WRONG ONE IN: Hospitality, Rape and Consent in Vampire Popular Culture. Her research interests lie in Vampire Studies, Television Studies, Cultural Studies (North America), and US Southern / Louisiana Regionalism.

Frank Jacob is Professor of Global History at Nord University, Norway. Jacob holds a doctorate in Japanese Studies from Erlangen University, Germany. His research focuses on Japanese media history as well as Global and Military History. His published works include Tsushima 1905 (Schöningh 2017), Gallipoli 1915/16 (Schöningh 2019), The Russo-Japanese War and Its Shaping of the 20th Century (Routledge 2018) and Japanese War Crimes during WWII (Praeger 2018).

Monstrosity and Agency, Monster History, Monster Media, Monster Film, Monster Literature