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This book examines the transformation of the figure of the stranger in the literature of the modern age in terms of liminality. As a ‘spectral monster’ that has a paradoxical and liminal relationship to both the sacred and the secular, the figure of the modern stranger has played a role in both adapting and shaping a culturally determined understanding of the self and the other. With the advent of modernity, the stranger, the monster, and the spectre became interconnected. Haunting the edges of reason while also being absorbed into ‘normal’ society, all three, together with the cyborg, manifest the vulnerability of an age that is fearful of the return of the repressed. Yet these figures can also become re-appropriated as positive symbols, able to navigate between the dangerous and chaotic elements that threaten society while serving as precarious and ironic symbols of hope or sustainability. The book shows the explanatory potential of focusing on the resacralizing – in a paradoxical and liminal manner – of traditionally sacred concepts such as ‘messianic’ time and the ‘utopian,’ and the conflicts that emerged as a result of secularized modernity’s denial of its own hybridization. This approach to modern literature shows how the modern stranger, a figure that is both paradoxically immersed and removed from society, deals with the dangers of failing to be re-assimilated into mainstream society and is caught in a fixed or permanent state of liminality, a state that can ultimately lead to boredom, alienation, nihilism, and failure. These ‘monstrous’ aspects of liminality can also be rewarding in that traversing difficult and paradoxical avenues they confront both traditional and contemporary viewpoints, enabling new and fresh perspectives suspended between imagination and reality, past and future, nature and artificial. In many ways, the modern stranger as a figure of literature and the cultural imagination has become more complicated and challenging in the (post)modern contemporary age, both clashing with and encompassing people who go beyond simply the psychological or even spiritual inability to blend in and out of society. However, while the stranger may be altering once again the defining or essentializing the figure could result in the creation of other sets of binaries, and thereby dissolve the purpose and productiveness of both strangeness and liminality. The intention of “Monstrous Liminality” is to trace the liminal sphere located between the secular and sacred that has characterized modernity itself. This space has consequently altered the makeup of the stranger from something external, into a figure far more liminal, which is forced to traverse this uncanny space in an attempt to find new meanings for an age that is struggling to maintain any.

Strangers in literature. --- Secularism --- Monstrous --- Modernity --- Resacralization --- Liminality --- Modern Stranger

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This inquiry concerns the cultural history of the chess-player. It takes as its premise the idea that the chess-player has become a fragmented collection of images, underpinned by challenges to, and confirmations of, chess's status as an intellectually-superior and socially-useful game, particularly since the medieval period. Yet, the chess-player is an understudied figure. No previous work has shone a light on the chess-player itself. Increasingly, chess-histories have retreated into tidy consensus. This work aspires to a novel reading of the figure as both a flickering beacon of reason and a sign of monstrosity. To this end, this book, utilising a wide range of sources, including newspapers, periodicals, detective novels, science-fiction, and comic-books, is underpinned by the idea that the chess-player is a pluralistic subject used to articulate a number of anxieties pertaining to themes of mind, machine, and monster.

Chess --- Chess players --- Board games --- Mathematical recreations --- Social aspects --- animal. --- automaton chess-player. --- child prodigy. --- detective fiction. --- masculinities. --- melancholic. --- monstrosity. --- monstrous bodies. --- moralities. --- sinner. --- statuesque chess-player. --- superhero. --- transhuman.

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"Starting with a sophisticated exploration of the historical development of the grotesque in literature, the book outlines the aesthetic trajectories of Angela Carter, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Iain Banks, Will Self and Toby Litt and offers detailed critical readings of key works of modern fiction including The Bloody Chamber (1979), Money (1984), The Child in Time (1987), The Wasp Factory (1984), Great Apes (1997) and Ghost Story (2004). The book shows how the grotesque continues to be a powerful force in contemporary writing and provides an illuminating picture of often controversial aspects of recent fiction."--Publisher's website.

English fiction --- Grotesque in literature. --- English literature --- History and criticism. --- Literature --- Literary Theory --- LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh --- Ireland --- Angela Carter. --- British fiction. --- British grotesque. --- British literature. --- European literary tradition. --- Iain Banks. --- Ian McEwan. --- Martin Amis. --- Toby Litt. --- Will Self. --- artistic mode. --- contemporary British writing. --- hallucinating characters. --- monstrous metamorphoses.

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In ancient China a monster called Taowu was known for both its vicious nature and its power to see the past and the future. Over the centuries Taowu underwent many incarnations until it became identifiable with history itself. Since the seventeenth century, fictive accounts of history have accommodated themselves to the monstrous nature of Taowu. Moving effortlessly across the entire twentieth-century literary landscape, David Der-wei Wang delineates the many meanings of Chinese violence and its literary manifestations. Taking into account the campaigns of violence and brutality that have rocked generations of Chinese-often in the name of enlightenment, rationality, and utopian plenitude-this book places its arguments along two related axes: history and representation, modernity and monstrosity. Wang considers modern Chinese history as a complex of geopolitical, ethnic, gendered, and personal articulations of bygone and ongoing events. His discussion ranges from the politics of decapitation to the poetics of suicide, and from the typology of hunger and starvation to the technology of crime and punishment.

S16/0170 --- S16/0195 --- China: Literature and theatrical art--General works on modern literature --- China: Literature and theatrical art--Thematic studies --- Chinese fiction --- Violence in literature. --- Roman chinois --- Violence dans la littérature --- History and criticism. --- Histoire et critique --- Violence in literature --- History and criticism --- 20th century. --- ancient china. --- asia scholars. --- brutal history. --- china. --- chinese history. --- chinese violence. --- crime and punishment. --- cultural violence. --- decapitation. --- discussion books. --- enlightenment. --- ethnic issues. --- gender issues. --- geopolitical change. --- historians. --- historical. --- history of violence. --- literary criticism. --- literary critics. --- literary landscape. --- modernity. --- monstrous history. --- nonfiction. --- politics. --- rationality. --- representation. --- students and teachers. --- suicide. --- taowu. --- textbooks.

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The first edition of Film as Religion was one of the first texts to develop a framework for the analysis of the religious function of films for audiences. Like more formal religious institutions, films can provide us with ways to view the world and the values to confront it. Lyden argues that the cultural influence of films is analogous to that of religions, so that films can be understood as representing a "religious" worldview in their own right. Thoroughly updating his examples, Lyden examines a range of film genres and individual films, from The Godfather to The Hunger Games to Frozen, to show how film can function religiously.

Motion pictures --- Moral and ethical aspects. --- Religious aspects. --- Action Film. --- Aliens. --- Attitudes. --- Audience Reception. --- Autonomy. --- Backlash. --- Beliefs. --- Catharsis. --- Circuit of culture. --- Civilization. --- Clifford Geertz. --- Communitas. --- Cultural Studies. --- Death. --- Discernment. --- Disenfranchised. --- Disney. --- Diversity. --- Dualism. --- Dystopia. --- Evaluation. --- Fascism. --- Fear. --- Feminism. --- Functionalist. --- Gangster. --- Genre. --- Heroism. --- Heterosexual. --- Ideal. --- Implied Viewer. --- Influence. --- Interreligious Dialogue. --- Irrational. --- Liminal Power. --- Liminal. --- Liminality. --- Melodrama. --- Metonymy. --- Models for Reality. --- Models of Reality. --- Monstrous. --- Moral Values. --- Norms. --- Popular Culture. --- Primitive. --- Projection. --- Reductionism. --- Relationships. --- Representation. --- Robots. --- Romantic. --- Sacrifice. --- Sexist. --- Sexuality. --- Status Quo. --- Subordination. --- Suffering. --- Superhero. --- Trends. --- Utopia. --- Values. --- Vietnam War. --- Violence. --- War on Terror. --- Western.