A book of monsters

Promethean horror in modern literature and culture

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David Ashford
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A book of monsters presents a cultural history of Promethean horror in the modern age. Beginning with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, this book explores imaginative literature that exploits popular fears relating not to a “gothic” darkness, but to a scientific Enlightenment. Provoked by the Promethean ambitions of Modernism, the Promethean myth is discovered to have become a pervasive and increasingly oppressive component in our post-Modernist political, economic and cultural reality. Revealing why it is that Modernism (a cultural phenomenon that, in architecture, typically defined itself against neo-gothic irrationality) has in turn become imbued with the uncanny, A book of monsters considers an eclectic range of cultural material including psycho-geographical fiction by Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore, the fantasies of J. R. R. Tolkien, gorilla horror movies, anxieties relating to artificial intelligence in science fiction and philosophy of science, and popular debates surrounding the legacies of post-war Brutalist architecture, in a subgenre of the dystopia that is specifically anti Keynesian. Building on post-humanist philosophy, engaging with recent debates concerning animals and artificial intelligence, A book of monsters attempts to place urgent theoretical controversies in a historical context, making connections with issues in architecture, linguistics, economics and cultural geography. In so doing, the book presents a compelling and comprehensive overview on the West’s collective “dream-work”’ in those decades since the dreams of the nineteenth century were realised in Modernism – tracing the inception, and outlining the consequences, of literary fantasies.

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