ENGL C101 Guide for Christine Swiridoff: Books

Readings by classic poets, contemporary fiction writers, pop culture critics, philosophers, psychologists, occultists, veterinarians, ethicists, historians, and others focus on central themes realted to monsters as Monsters helps you make sustained inquries from multiple perspectives in order to focus your writing.

Explores what human traits monsters represent and why they are so ubiquitous in people's imaginations and share so many features across different cultures.Using colorful and absorbing evidence from virtually all times and places, Monsters is the first attempt by an anthropologist to delve into the mysterious, frightful abyss of mythical beasts and to interpret their role in the psyche and in society.

Through a historical sampling of monsters, these essays argue that our fascination for the monstrous testifies to our continued desire to explore difference and prohibition.

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.

Readers' advisors and librarians will appreciate the key tools provided to expand upon this genre, including listings of top books, authors, and award winners within eleven horror subgenres-like mummies, biomedical, monsters, and splatterpunk. Clear descriptions of characteristics within subgenres are provided throughout. To further help you engage new readers, expert horror mavens Spratford and Clausen draw a savvy connection between film and horror as a potent reminder that the scariest movies have been adapted from novels.

Considering monsters squarely from a literary standpoint, introducing elements of literary analysis gradually as the work progresses, and building up to quite a sophisticated approach. This will increase readers' critical appreciation and plain enjoyment of these stories, which continue to fascinate today. To facilitate browsing, each chapter can be read independently.

Scholars ask why our culture has becomes so fascinated by the zombie apocalypse. Essays address this question from a range of theoretical perspectives that tie our consumption of zombies to larger narratives of race, gender, sexuality, politics, economics and the end of the world.

Drawing on literary and artistic representations, as well as medical, forensic, empirical, and sociopolitical perspectives, this rich and eerie history presents the vampire as a strikingly complex being that has been used to express the traumas and contradictions of the human condition.