Hideous Progeny

Hideous Progeny PDF Author: Angela Smith
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231527853
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Twisted bodies, deformed faces, aberrant behavior, and abnormal desires characterized the hideous creatures of classic Hollywood horror, which thrilled audiences with their sheer grotesqueness. Most critics have interpreted these traits as symptoms of sexual repression or as metaphors for other kinds of marginalized identities, yet Angela M. Smith conducts a richer investigation into the period's social and cultural preoccupations. She finds instead a fascination with eugenics and physical and cognitive debility in the narrative and spectacle of classic 1930s horror, heightened by the viewer's desire for visions of vulnerability and transformation. Reading such films as Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), Freaks (1932), and Mad Love (1935) against early-twentieth-century disability discourse and propaganda on racial and biological purity, Smith showcases classic horror's dependence on the narratives of eugenics and physiognomics. She also notes the genre's conflicted and often contradictory visualizations. Smith ultimately locates an indictment of biological determinism in filmmakers' visceral treatments, which take the impossibility of racial improvement and bodily perfection to sensationalistic heights. Playing up the artifice and conventions of disabled monsters, filmmakers exploited the fears and yearnings of their audience, accentuating both the perversity of the medical and scientific gaze and the debilitating experience of watching horror. Classic horror films therefore encourage empathy with the disabled monster, offering captive viewers an unsettling encounter with their own impairment. Smith's work profoundly advances cinema and disability studies, in addition to general histories concerning the construction of social and political attitudes toward the Other.

Hideous Progeny

Hideous Progeny PDF Author: Angela Smith
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231527853
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Twisted bodies, deformed faces, aberrant behavior, and abnormal desires characterized the hideous creatures of classic Hollywood horror, which thrilled audiences with their sheer grotesqueness. Most critics have interpreted these traits as symptoms of sexual repression or as metaphors for other kinds of marginalized identities, yet Angela M. Smith conducts a richer investigation into the period's social and cultural preoccupations. She finds instead a fascination with eugenics and physical and cognitive debility in the narrative and spectacle of classic 1930s horror, heightened by the viewer's desire for visions of vulnerability and transformation. Reading such films as Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), Freaks (1932), and Mad Love (1935) against early-twentieth-century disability discourse and propaganda on racial and biological purity, Smith showcases classic horror's dependence on the narratives of eugenics and physiognomics. She also notes the genre's conflicted and often contradictory visualizations. Smith ultimately locates an indictment of biological determinism in filmmakers' visceral treatments, which take the impossibility of racial improvement and bodily perfection to sensationalistic heights. Playing up the artifice and conventions of disabled monsters, filmmakers exploited the fears and yearnings of their audience, accentuating both the perversity of the medical and scientific gaze and the debilitating experience of watching horror. Classic horror films therefore encourage empathy with the disabled monster, offering captive viewers an unsettling encounter with their own impairment. Smith's work profoundly advances cinema and disability studies, in addition to general histories concerning the construction of social and political attitudes toward the Other.

Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny

Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny PDF Author: Julie Grossman
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137399023
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
This book posits adaptations as 'hideous progeny,' Mary Shelley's term for her novel, Frankenstein . Like Shelley's novel and her fictional Creature, adaptations that may first be seen as monstrous in fact compel us to shift our perspective on known literary or film works and the cultures that gave rise to them.

'Hideous Progeny'

'Hideous Progeny' PDF Author: Angela Marie Smith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 652

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Book Description


My Hideous Progeny

My Hideous Progeny PDF Author: Katherine Hill-Miller
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
"My Hideous Progeny" : Mary Shelley, William Godwin, and the Father-Daughter Relationship is a study of the influence of William Godwin on his daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. "My Hideous Progeny" explores Godwin's unsettling psychological legacy - and his generous intellectual gifts - to his daughter. The relationship between Mary Shelley and her father illustrates a typical pattern of female development and a typical course of father-daughter relationships over a lifetime. Mary Shelley's response to her father's influence is unforgettably portrayed in the figure of the father in the pages of her novels.

Hideous Progeny

Hideous Progeny PDF Author: Brian Willis
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780953146833
Category : Frankenstein, Victor (Fictitious character)
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Work of collected fiction.

Hideous Progeny

Hideous Progeny PDF Author: Angela M. Smith
Publisher:
ISBN: 9786613792150
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Twisted bodies, deformed faces, aberrant behavior, and abnormal desires characterized the hideous creatures of classic Hollywood horror, which thrilled audiences with their sheer grotesqueness. Most critics have interpreted such traits as symptoms of sexual repression, or as metaphors for other kinds of marginalized identities, but Angela M. Smith conducts a richer investigation into the period's social and cultural preoccupations. Presenting an altogether different reading, she finds in the narrative and spectacle of classic 1930s horror a fascination with eugenics and physical and

Our Hideous Progeny

Our Hideous Progeny PDF Author: C.E. McGill
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063256819
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
“A gripping Gothic tale of grief and ambition, passion and intrigue.” — Jess Kidd, author of The Night Ship “An immersive blend of historical and science fiction brims with surprises and dark delights. . . . An incisive exploration of women’s rights within the field of science. . . . Readers will revel in Mary’s personal and scientific discoveries and root for her to succeed in an unfair world.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review) As featured in Lit Hub, Lambda Literary Review, Book Riot and CrimeReads It is not the monster you must fear, but the monster it makes of men . . . Mary is the great-niece of Victor Frankenstein. She knows her great uncle disappeared under mysterious circumstances in the Arctic, but she doesn’t know why or how. . . . The 1850s are a time of discovery, and London is ablaze with the latest scientific theories and debates, especially when a spectacular new exhibition of dinosaur sculptures opens at the Crystal Palace. Mary is keen to make her name in this world of science alongside her geologist husband, Henry—but despite her sharp mind and sharper tongue, without wealth and connections their options are limited. When Mary discovers some old family papers that allude to the shocking truth behind her great-uncle’s past, she thinks she may have found the key to securing her and Henry’s professional and financial future. Their quest takes them to the wilds of Scotland; to Henry’s intriguing but reclusive sister, Maisie; and to a deadly chase with a rival who is out to steal their secret. A queer, feminist masterpiece inspired by Mary Shelley’s classic, Our Hideous Progeny is a sumptuous tale of ambition and obsession, of forbidden love and sabotage and a twisty Gothic adventure that may forever change your view of human nature.

My Hideous Progeny

My Hideous Progeny PDF Author: Cynthia Hamberg
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Hideous Progenies

Hideous Progenies PDF Author: Steven Earl Forry
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512802034
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
The Frankenstein we know is not Mary Shelley's creature at all. Rather it is an amalgam of over 200 years of images and dramatizations that range from the ghoulish fiends of nineteenth-century sensation dramas to Boris Karloff's movie monster to Mel Brooks's tap-dancing giant. These versions treat the Frankenstein myth with varying levels of horror, hysteria, and humor, but all of them attest to its enduring power. In Hideous Progenies, Steven Earl Forry offers a historical overview of the legend's transformation over time—beginning with Shelley's original and the earliest popular dramatizations of it (which transformed the myth, adding a burlesque quality and simplifying its moral allegory) and continuing on through the advent of cinema. He also documents this development with actual texts of seven pre-1931 dramatizations, a sampling of cartoons and playbills, and a shooting script for the first cinematic version, Thomas Edison's Frankenstein (1910). Forry's rare materials and interesting survey offer a valuable resource for scholars and students of theater history, literary history, and popular culture.

My Mother Was a Computer

My Mother Was a Computer PDF Author: N. Katherine Hayles
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226321495
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
We live in a world, according to N. Katherine Hayles, where new languages are constantly emerging, proliferating, and fading into obsolescence. These are languages of our own making: the programming languages written in code for the intelligent machines we call computers. Hayles's latest exploration provides an exciting new way of understanding the relations between code and language and considers how their interactions have affected creative, technological, and artistic practices. My Mother Was a Computer explores how the impact of code on everyday life has become comparable to that of speech and writing: language and code have grown more entangled, the lines that once separated humans from machines, analog from digital, and old technologies from new ones have become blurred. My Mother Was a Computer gives us the tools necessary to make sense of these complex relationships. Hayles argues that we live in an age of intermediation that challenges our ideas about language, subjectivity, literary objects, and textuality. This process of intermediation takes place where digital media interact with cultural practices associated with older media, and here Hayles sharply portrays such interactions: how code differs from speech; how electronic text differs from print; the effects of digital media on the idea of the self; the effects of digitality on printed books; our conceptions of computers as living beings; the possibility that human consciousness itself might be computational; and the subjective cosmology wherein humans see the universe through the lens of their own digital age. We are the children of computers in more than one sense, and no critic has done more than N. Katherine Hayles to explain how these technologies define us and our culture. Heady and provocative, My Mother Was a Computer will be judged as her best work yet.