Urban Monstrosities: Perversity and Upheaval in the Unreal City

Sign of sublime excess and transgression, guardian of the threshold and uncanny creature par excellence, the monster of late has also become a mainstay of urban narratives – even while its presence in these texts remains untheorized. The authors in this collection show how artists and writers across the past two hundred years, from William Wordsworth to China Miéville, figure the monster as a barometer of changing urban patterns. Here, monstrosity becomes the herald of embryonic social forms and marginalized populations in portrayals of cities across media – from video games, film and avant-garde sonic experiments to written tales of urban fantasy and gothic ruin.

This volume suggests that poetic and municipal structures evolve in tandem. Within its chapters, unearthly buildings and beings signal a host of new urban dispensations.


Joseph DeFalco Lamperez is completing a PhD in English Literature at the University of Rochester, USA. His dissertation, “The Idol and the Machine: Hinduism and Technology in the Romantic Imagination,” shows that the Industrial Revolution was understood in reference to Hinduism, a trope allowing writers to imagine a global network reliant on new technologies and pagan social forms. His work has appeared in Studies in Romanticism, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, and Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net.

J. Alexandra McGhee received a PhD in English Literature from the University of Rochester, USA. Her academic research and writing focus on boundary transgressions, intersections of human creativity and technology, and hauntings, both literal and figurative. Her academic work has appeared in Atlantic Studies, The Edgar Allan Poe Review, Romantic Circles, and Symbiosis. Her short fiction has appeared in Slippery Elm Literary Journal and Dark Mountain. In 2011, she was the recipient of a Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr., prize from the Keats-Shelley Association of America, and she received the William H. Gilman Memorial Dissertation Prize from the University of Rochester in 2015. She is the Editorial Director of the Asheville Grit (ashevillegrit.com).

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ISBN: 1-4438-9134-7

ISBN13: 978-1-4438-9134-9

Release Date: 19th October 2017

Pages: 181

Price: £58.99

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