Making of the Monstrous Human

How to rethink the history of western modernity, given the urgent priorities of the Anthropocene and the climate crisis? One unorthodox but revealing perspective, argues James Donald, may be found in the imagined monsters that writers and artists have dreamt up to make sense of human life and its limits in the long centuries of modernisation. Thinking with monsters, he suggests in this wide-ranging survey of literature, cinema and philosophy, has been a fruitful if seldom acknowledged tradition, stretching from Hobbes’s Leviathan and Frankenstein’s man-monster, through the fin-de-siècle vampire Dracula and H. G. Wells’s invading Martians, to the monstrous imagery of twentieth-century dystopias. Donald emphasizes not only the terrifying destructiveness of the monstrous, but also the ways in which monsters embody new forms of life and their satirical deployment to expose the cruelties and absurdities of human behaviour. Contemporary topics examined include the increasingly uncanny human/technology interface; the human body (especially the aging human body) as an object of horror; the follies of transhumanism; the monstrous rhetoric espoused by transgender intellectuals; and the renaissance of apocalyptic thinking in the Anthropocene. The book’s ecological conclusion is that an acknowledgement of the inherently monstrous nature of humans might prompt us to tread more lightly on the Earth: an argument less for posthumanism, than for an ethic of monstrous humanism.