James Baldwin Talking About Love

Medea, by William Wetmore Story, at the Met

Illustration for Wuthering Heights by Felix Abel Klaer

Manuel Bujados (1889-1954), “La Esfera”, October 1915

@onpyre asked if I knew any books about monster theory, and I decided to share my list with everyone. I haven’t read all of these, so please let me know if any of them is absolute crap.

Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (particularly his ‘Seven Theses’)

The Monster Theory Reader, ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (great introduction to a lot of different texts and ways of approaching this kind of study, so big rec!)

Ten Theses on Monsters and Monstrosity, Allen S. Weiss + this lecture

The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Asa Simon Mittman and Peter Dendle (particularly the introduction)

Monsters, John Michael Greer

Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors, David D. Gilmore

Horror and the Holy: Wisdom-Teachings of the Monster Tale, Kirk J. Schneider

On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, Stephen T. Asma

Other related resources:

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Edmund Burke (here)

The Uncanny, Sigmund Freud (here)

Abnormal, Michel Foucault (here)

Powers of Horror: Essays on Abjection, Julia Kristeva

The Monstrous-Feminine, Barbara Creed

Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques: Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the United States, ed. Michael E. Heyes

The Monster Show. A Cultural History of Horror, David J. Skal

Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness, Richard Kearney

Our Vampires, Ourselves, Nina Auerbach

Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, And The Middle Ages, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Frankenstein and the Language of Monstrosity, Fred Botting (here)

Theses on Monsters, China Miéville (here)

Commission for Johnicholas Hines! Based on this drawing

The Epic of Gilgamesh illustrated by Wael Tarabieh (½)

The Epic of Gilgamesh illustrated by Wael Tarabieh (2/2)

“Dionysus is powerful because he is a god; but in myth, at least, the god conceals his divinity in order to impress his presence all the more forcefully on mortals. In his mythical epiphanies, he exercises his destructive power from a position of apparent weakness and inferiority… the punishment he inflicts is often indirect, deceptive and designed to hide his presence and downplay his power; unlike Apollo or Artemis, he does not kill his victims through direct divine intervention, but relies on those self-destructive drives within their human nature that case madness, self-mutilation or transformation.”

— Albert Henrichs, “He Has a God in Him”: Human and Divine in the Modern Perception of Dionysus

american sterling silver and enamel eros and psyche relief vesta case, c. 19oo

Sleeping Bacchant by Károly Lotz (19th Century)