26 Jun 2024

Post-Modern Monsters

David Ashford. Book of Monsters: Promethean Horror in Modern Literature and Culture. ‎ Manchester University Press. (11 June 2024)

This books traces the rise to prominence in the twentieth-century of a sub-genre of gothic fiction that is, emphatically, a horror of enlightenment rationality rather than gothic darkness, examining post-modern revisions of Modernist “Promethean” tropes in an eclectic range of gothic, fantasy and SF writing. 

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Whether the subject be terror of London’s churches in the psychogeographical fiction of Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore, the Orcs in the linguistic fantasies of J.R.R. Tolkien, King Kong, killer-computers, or demon-children in post-war British science-fiction, A Book of Monsters offers illuminating perspectives on the darker recesses of the post-modern imagination, setting out a compelling, and comprehensive, overview on our contemporary unconscious.