Monstrous Textualities

A literary study on Gothic narratives of resistance that brings together a range of critical approaches.

Monstrous textualities emerge when Gothic narratives like Frankenstein employ the monstrous in their narrative structure to create stories of resistance, allowing writers to reflect upon their own poetics as they reclaim authority over their work under oppressive circumstances. This book traces the representation of the other through Black feminist hauntology in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Love. It also explores fat freak embodiment as a feminist resistance strategy in Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus and Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle. Finally, it reads Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy and Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl within a framework of critical posthumanist and cyborg theory. The result is a comprehensive argument about how these texts can be read within a framework of the critical posthumanist questioning of knowledge production, as well as an epistemological exploration beyond an exclusionary humanist paradigm.