Brilliantly explores the horror of enlightenment rationality. Ashford wins the reader over with fascinating stories and details, bringing into play his wide and deep knowledge of just about everything.
Michael Hauskeller, University of Liverpool
A Book of Monsters presents a cultural history of Promethean Horror in the modern age. Beginning with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, this book explores imaginative literature that exploits popular fears relating, not to a ‘Gothic’ darkness, but to a scientific Enlightenment.
Revealing why it is that Modernism has in turn become imbued with the uncanny, the chapters consider an eclectic range of cultural material including psycho-geographical fiction by Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore, the fantasies of J.R.R. Tolkien, Gorilla horror movies, anxieties relating to Artificial Intelligence in science fiction and philosophy of science, and popular debates surrounding the legacies of post-war Brutalist architecture, in a subgenre of the dystopia that is specifically anti-Keynesian.
Building on post-humanist philosophy and engaging with recent debates, A Book of Monsters attempts to place urgent theoretical controversies in a historical context, making connections with issues in architecture, linguistics, economics and cultural geography.
In doing so, the book presents a compelling and comprehensive overview on the West’s collective ‘dream-work’ in those decades since the dreams of the nineteenth century were realised in Modernism – tracing the inception and outlining the consequences of literary fantasies.
A Book of Monsters is the third book by David Ashford, expanding upon the essays “Gorillas in the House of Light” (Cambridge Quarterly: 2011), “Architects of the Occult” (Literary London: 2014), “The Mechanical Turk” (Cambridge Quarterly: 2017), and “Orc-Talk” (JFA: 2018).
Essays available to read:
- “Orc-Talk” (JFA: 2018)
- “The Mechanical Turk” (Cambridge Quarterly: 2017)
- “Architects of the Occult” (Literary London: 2014)
- “Gorillas in the House of Light” (Cambridge Quarterly: 2011)
A Book of Monsters is available to purchase directly from Manchester University Press, Amazon UK and Amazon US.
Currently the book is available in hard back only – please do order it in to your local library using this form.