The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous eds. by Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle (review)

Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle amass a rich cache of scholarship spanning a diverse array of literary, cinematic, and cultural materials and traversing formidable temporal, geographic, and theoretical boundaries in their recent Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. Though a cursory inspection might lead one to assume that such a variety of subjects bespeaks a disparate, unfocused critical trajectory or perhaps a frenetic lack of coherence, this is not the case. I dare say further inquiry clarifies how the range of work in this text demonstrates the ubiquitous allure the monstrous holds across time, space, and discipline. Simultaneously, its capacious scope signals the heretoforeunexplored expanse of critical terrain for which this research companion acts as a harbinger.

Framing their companion in light of John Block Friedman’s 1981 The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s 1996 Monster Theory: Reading Culture among others—including Bettina Bildhauer, Robert Mills, and Andy Orchard, just to name a few—Mittman and Dendle draw heavily on critical paradigms of the monstrous that have developed in the field of medieval studies. Yet they encourage their contributors to fly far afield in terms of the methodologies and subject matters of their respective projects. Less concerned with determining whether people have always believed in monsters, the impetus of this text lies in classifying and understanding what constitutes the monstrous. Moving beyond physical embodiment and the limits imposed by behavioral and cultural boundaries, the editors instead urge their contributors to explore the impact of monsters and the monstrous. They are ultimately concerned with assessing in what ways the idea of the monstrous can decenter, destabilize. In this respect, for the editors, the monstrous calls into question what and how we know, not only our environment but also, ourselves.

The Companion disrupts a purely occidental epistemological standpoint through its infusion of global studies of monstrosity with studies of more familiar North American and European examples. Divided into loosely defined historical and theoretical sections, the book refuses to construct any particular chronological or geographic narrative, which Mittman observes to be no more or less arbitrary than any other way they might have chosen to arrange its contents. Understandably, with such a broad subject the text naturally tends to the episodic rather than the exhaustive, yet the authors whose work make up this volume ably maintain an enduring but flexible investigation into the monstrous which serves to illustrate that the more we know about our monsters the more we know about their social contexts.

Opening the first section of the book, “History of Monstrosity,” Persephone Braham’s “The Monstrous Caribbean” questions how figures of monstrosity—specifically cannibals, amazons, sirens, and zombies—persist as cultural identifiers for Haiti, the Caribbean, and other parts of Latin America, and traces these associations from their imposition by early European explorers to their contemporary uses in works of fiction and cinema that contextualize, undergird, and/or challenge these same connections.

In her contribution “The Unlucky, the Bad and the Ugly,” Surekha Davies focuses on three strands of Renaissance teratology: divine prodigies, maternal impressions, and exotic monstrous races. She explores the foundations of these beliefs in classical works by Aristotle, Cicero, and Pliny the Elder, and then demonstrates how these build on one another through the centuries, reaching their apogee, perhaps, in the works of various eighteenth-century European authors.

Henry John Drewel, in “Beauteous Beast,” investigates the protean depiction of this African and African Atlantic water divinity as mother, mistress, and monster. Exploring Mami Wata’s visual history from traditional African arts, through her infusion with the European mermaid, then the Eastern snake charmer, Drewel shows how her progressive demonization—continuing even into contemporary representations—reflects the particular cultural needs of observers at specific instances.

Debbie Felton’s “Rejecting and Embracing the Monstrous in Ancient Greece and Rome” scrutinizes...