Landscapes of Monstrosity

This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2016. Monsters have been with us since time immemorial. They have been present in the earliest creation myths and today populate all media of fantasy, horror, action and adventure, as well as science fiction. Over the past years, scholars have attentively studied the prominent presence of vampires, zombies, and other monsters in films and TV series that breathed new life into long-forgotten stories and monstrous characters. Simultaneously, the past decades have witnessed an increase of public and scholarly interest in space and place, resulting in what is known in academia as the Spatial Turn, leaving its mark on fields ranging from geography through literature and cultural memory studies. This book bears witness to the diversity of approaches to studying the intersections of monstrosity and geography. The monstrous entails the affective registers of fear, anxiety, trauma, as well as forms of excess and transgression. Likewise, geographies are both physical and metaphorical, corporeal and psychological, rural and urban, real and imagined. The chapters of this book address each of these aspects.