What woeful maternal fancy produced such a monster? This was once the question asked when a deformed infant was born. From classical antiquity through to the Enlightenment, the monstrous child bore witness to the fearsome power of the mother's imagination. What such a notion meant and how it reappeared, transformed, in the Romantic period are the questions explored in this book, a study of theories linking imagination, art and monstrous progeny.
In 1726, an illiterate woman from Surrey named Mary Toft announced that she had given birth to 17 rabbits. This study recreates the story of this incident and shows how it illuminates 18th-century beliefs about the power of imagination and the problems of personal identity.
Interdisciplinary Essays on Monsters and the Monstrous analyses and explores the enduring influence and imagery of monsters and the monstrous on human societies, and from a unique interdisciplinary scope tackles the critical question: when faced with an existential threat, what can we do?
The notions of other peoples, cultures, and natural conditions have always been determined by the epistemology of imagination and fantasy, providing much freedom and creativity, and yet have also created much fear, anxiety, and horror. In this regard, the pre-modern world demonstrates striking parallels with our own insofar as the projections of alterity might be different by degrees, but they are fundamentally the same by content. Dreams, illusions, projections, concepts, hopes, utopias/dystopias, desires, and emotional attachments are as specific and impactful as the physical environment. This volume thus sheds important light on the various lenses used by people in the Middle Ages and the early modern age as to how they came to terms with their perceptions, images, and notions. Previous scholarship focused heavily on the history of mentality and history of emotions, whereas here the history of pre-modern imagination, and fantasy assumes center position. Imaginary things are taken seriously because medieval and early modern writers and artists clearly reveal their great significance in their works and their daily lives. This approach facilitates a new deep-structure analysis of pre-modern culture.
This book examines the ways in which ideas about children, childhood and Ireland changed together in Irish Protestant writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It focuses on different varieties of the child found in the work of a range of Irish Protestant writers, theologians, philosophers, educationalists, politicians and parents from the early seventeenth century up to the outbreak of the 1798 Rebellion. The book is structured around a detailed examination of six ‘versions’ of the child: the evil child, the vulnerable/innocent child, the political child, the believing child, the enlightened child, and the freakish child. It traces these versions across a wide range of genres (fiction, sermons, political pamphlets, letters, educational treatises, histories, catechisms and children’s bibles), showing how concepts of childhood related to debates about Irish nationality, politics and history across these two centuries.
Using Vladimir Nabokov and Salman Rushdie's work, this study argues that transnational fiction refuses the simple oppositions of postcolonial theory and suggests the possibility of an inclusive global literature.
A culture defines monsters against what is essentially thought of as human. Creatures such as the harpy, the siren, the witch, and the half-human all threaten to destroy our sense of power and intelligence and usurp our human consciousness. In this way, monster myths actually work to define a culture's definition of what is human. In Monsters in the Italian Literary Imagination, a broad range of scholars examine the monster in Italian culture and its evolution from the medieval period to the twentieth century. Editor Keala Jewell explores how Italian culture juxtaposes the powers of the monster against the human. The essays in this volume engage a wide variety of philological, feminist, and psychoanalytical approaches and examine monstrous figures from the medieval to postmodern periods. They each share a critical interest in how monsters reflect a culture's dominant ideologies.
Force of Imagination The Sense of the Elemental John Sallis A bold and original investigation into how imagination shapes thought and feeling. "This is a bold new direction for the author, one that he takes in an arresting and convincing manner.... a powerful, original approach to what others call 'ecology' but what Sallis shows to be a question of the status of the earth in philosophical thinking at this historical moment." --Edward S. Casey In this major original work, John Sallis probes the very nature of imagination and reveals how the force of imagination extends into all spheres of human life. While drawing critically on the entire history of philosophy, Sallis's work takes up a vantage point determined by the contemporary deconstruction of the classical opposition between sensible and intelligible. Thus, in reinterrogating the nature of imagination, Force of Imagination carries out a radical turn to the sensible and to the elemental in nature. Liberated from subjectivity, imagination is shown to play a decisive role both in drawing together the moments of our experience of sensible things and in opening experience to the encompassing light, atmosphere, earth, and sky. Set within this elemental expanse, the human sense of time, of self, and of the other proves to be inextricably linked to imagination and to nature. By showing how imagination is formative for the very opening upon things and elements, this work points to the revealing power of poetic imagination and casts a new light on the nature of art. John Sallis is Liberal Arts Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. His previous books include Being and Logos: Reading the Platonic Dialogues; Shades--Of Painting at the Limit; Stone; Chorology: On Beginning in Plato's Timaeus (all published by Indiana University Press), Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy and Double Truth. Studies in Continental Thought--John Sallis, editor Contents Prolusions On (Not Simply) Beginning Remembrance Duplicity of the Image Spacing the Image Tractive Imagination The Elemental Temporalities Proprieties Poetic Imagination
In 1726, an illiterate woman from Surrey named Mary Toft announced that she had given birth to 17 rabbits. This study recreates the story of this incident and shows how it illuminates 18th-century beliefs about the power of imagination and the problems of personal identity.
It can be considered the most systemic, deadly, and all-encompassing form of institutional violence that currently exists: speciesism, the oppression and exploitation of other animals. For most people on our planet, speciesism is something completely normalized, justified, and encouraged through many facets of dominant cultures. The field of critical/political animal studies, and other fields that challenge anthropocentrism, have already thoroughly problematized, questioned, and analyzed speciesist practices, but one topic receives little academic attention: what can a counter-concept to speciesism contain, without saying what it is not? This thesis is concerned with imagining ‘multispecies worldings’, with the goal to construct positive rather than negative aspects of a counter-concept to speciesism. Instead of offering a single answer, this work illustrates how additive knowledges regarding the possible meanings of ‘multispecies worlding’ make worlds richer. These knowledges emerge through a repertoire of world-making practices with other animals in which we recognize and engage with the ability to respond to each other. Thereby, this thesis answers to – and builds on – various scholarly and activist discourses, including posthumanism, welfarism, animal liberationism, and is theoretically grounded in feminist epistemologies. With a focus on negotiating possibilities, this dissertation is also a work of interaction design. The design practice involves tracing and negotiating multispecies responses with other animals and expressing those narratives as a design research program. These responses are presented as a Multispecies Bestiary, in which ten protagonist animals guide the reader through a collection of big-enough multispecies stories. The thesis thereby illustrates how humans can – together with other animals – find possible meanings of ‘multispecies worlding’ not as a single (broken) solution, but as ever-expanding directions that can permanently unsettle and unmake the established speciesist order.
