Monsters provide a key to understanding the culture that spawned them. So argues the essays in this wide-ranging collection that asks the question, what happens when critical theorists take the study of monsters seriously as a means of examining our culture?

Part 1 Monster theory: Monster culture (seven theses), Jeffrey Jerome Cohen; Beowulf as palimpsest, Ruth Waterhouse; Monstrosity, illegibility, denegation: the martyrology after de Man, David L. Clark. Part 2 Monstrous identity: the odd couple: Gargantua and Tom Thumb, Anne Lake Prescott; America's united siameses brothers: Chang and Eng and nineteenth century ideologies of democracy and domesticity, Allison Pingree; Liberty, equality, monstrosity: revolutionizing the family in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, David Hirsch. Part 3 Monstrous inquiry: No monsters at the resurrection: inside some conjoined twins, Stephen Pender; Representing the cripple: cognition, cripples, and other limp parts, Larry Kritzman; Hermaphrodites newly discovered: the cultural monsters of sixteenth century France, Kathleen Perry Long; Anthropometamorphosis: John Bulwer's monsters of cosmetology, Mary Baine Campbell. Part 4 Monstrous history: Vampire culture, Frank Grady; The alien and the alienated as unquiet dead in the sagas of the Icelanders, Will Sayers; Unthinking the monster: twelfth-century responses to saracen alterity, Michael Uebel; Dinosaurs-R-us: the (un)natural history of Jurassic Park, John O'Neill.