"Presents a new path of scholarship ... offers rare interrogations on how monstrosity must be considered in relationship to gender, procreations, and relationships [with] 14 well-written essays ... Essentially, Unnatural Reproductions and Monstrosity offers a more thorough treatment and ethical query of reproductive monstrosity and unnatural parturition. In this regard, how women, maternity, and motherhood are treated in literature, film, and media are especially scrutinized and evaluated ... well-written, scholarly, and edgy ... a well-focused edition [that] offers innovative topics and new concepts on how monsters haunt and attract us, frightening and stimulating our imaginations, if not also making us rethink what it means to be human." —Rocky Mountain Review

Andrea Wood is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the English Department at Winona State University. She holds a PhD from the University of Florida, a Master’s from the University of Edinburgh, and a BA from McGill University. Dr. Wood has published articles in Women’s Studies Quarterly, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, and Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry. She has also published her work in the edited collections Over the Rainbow: Queer Children’s Literature and Global Visual Cultures: An Anthology. Dr. Wood is coediting a special issue of Journal of Popular Romance Studies on “Queering Romance,” which will be released in 2015.

About Brandy Schillace

A medical-humanities and history scholar, Brandy Schillace (PhD) is research associate, guest curator, and public engagement contact at the Dittrick Museum of Medical History and managing editor of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry (an international journal of cross-cultural health research). She helps develop medical humanities curriculum for the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College and teaches for Case Western Reserve University’s SAGES program. Dr. Schillace’s book Death’s Summer Coat: What the History of Death and Dying can Tell us about Life and Living will be released in 2015 with Elliott and Thompson. She has published in a variety of journals, including Eighteenth-Century Studies and Feminist Formations, and writes for Huffington Post, H-net, and the Centre for Medical Humanities Blog. Dr. Schillace was an invited lecturer in 2010 at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester, UK, and keynote speaker for the 2013 Association for Librarians in the History of Health Sciences.

Introduction Our Monstrous Ways (Brandy Schillace and Andrea Wood)

I. Theorizing Monstrous Genesis: Past, Present, and Future

Chapter 1. Renaissance Demons and Posthuman Cyborgs: Ambroise Paré’s On Monsters and Marvels and Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” (Alistair Brown )

Chapter 2. The Devil Made Me Do It: Sin, (Inner) Demons, and Monstrous Reproduction in Milton’s Paradise Lost (Joanna Shearer)

Chapter 3. Constructing the Vampire: Spirit Agency in the Construction of the Vampire in the Anonymous Acten-mabige und Umstansliche Relation von denen Vampiren oder Menschen-Saugern (1732) (Michael Pickering)

Chapter 4. Monsters that Matter: The Monstrous Birth and Other Things that Rise in the Contemporary Zombie Film (Jesse Stommel)

II. Repetition and Replication: Unnatural Reproduction(s)

Chapter 5. Monstrosity, Monument and Multiplication: ‘The Lamenting Lady’ Margaret of Henneberg (and her 365 Children) in Early Modern England (Lindsay Ann Reid)

Chapter 6. Death, Disease and Discontent: The Monstrous Reign of the Super-virus (Emilie Taylor-Brown)

Chapter 7. Serial Death and the Zombie: The Networked Necronomics of Left 4 Dead (Stephanie Boluk)

III. Dangerous Maternity and Monstrous Mothers

Chapter 8. Mothering Monsters: Avoidances, Intervention and Response to Freakery in Progressive America (K.A. Woytonik)

Chapter 9. Hypersaurus Rex: Recombinant Reality in Jurassic Park (Randy Laist)

Chapter 10. Monstrous Mothers and the Ultimate Sacrifice: Vampiric Pregnancies in Angel and Breaking Dawn (Dani Lawson)

IV. Innocence Lost: Monstrous Children

Chapter 11. ‘Children of the Night’: Dracula, Degeneration and Syphilitic Births at fin de siècle (Brandy Schillace)

Chapter 12. Monstrous Births and Monstrous Children in the Late Nineteenth Century (Alison Crockford)

Chapter 13. Gender, Genetic Engineering, and Ethics: Transhumanism in Splice and Hanna (April Miller)

Chapter 14. Failed Futurity: Reproductive Anxieties, Undead Children, and Queering Survival in Apocalyptic Zombie Films (Andrea Wood)

References

Index