Beasts of the Deep

Description

Beasts of the Deep: Sea Creatures and Popular Culture offers its readers an in-depth and interdisciplinary engagement with the sea and its monstrous inhabitants; through critical readings of folklore, weird fiction, film, music, radio and digital games.

Within the text there are a multitude of convergent critical perspectives used to engage and explore fictional and real monsters of the sea in media and folklore. The collection features chapters from a variety of academic perspectives; post- modernism, psychoanalysis, industrial-organisational analysis, fandom studies, sociology and philosophy are featured. Under examination are a wide range of narratives and media forms that represent, reimagine and create the Kraken, mermaids, giant sharks, sea draugrs and even the weird creatures of H.P. Lovecraft.

Beasts of the Deep offers an expansive study of our sea-born fears and anxieties, that are crystallised in a variety of monstrous forms. Repeatedly the chapters in the collection encounter the contemporary relevance of our fears of the sea and its inhabitants – through the dehumanising media depictions of refugees in the Mediterranean to the encroaching ecological disasters of global warming, pollution and the threat of mass marine extinction.

Part 1: Folklore and Weird Tales
"From Beneath the Waves": Sea-Draugr and the Popular Conscience – Alexander Hay
The Depths of our Experience: Thalassophobia and the Lovecraftian Horror – Seán J. Harrington
From Depths of Terror to Depths of Wonder: The Sublime in Lovecraft's Call of Cthulhu and Cameron's The Abyss – Vivan Joseph
"Is there sound in the deep?": Representation and resonance in radio dramatisations of The Kraken Wakes – Farokh Soltani
Part 2: Depths of Desire
Beauty and the Octopus: Cephalopods as Sexualized Monsters – Marco Carbone
The Octopussy: Exploring Representations of Female Sexuality and Animality in Victor Hugo's The Toilers of the Sea (1866) and The Laughing Man (1868) – Laura Ettenfield
Transformations of Desire in The Life Aquatic (2004) – Pete Fossey
Psychedelic Deep Blues: Jimi Hendrix's, 1983 (A Merman I Should Turn to be) (1968), Tim Buckley's, Song of the Siren (1968) and Captain Beefheart's, Grow Fins (1972) – Richard Mills
Part 3: Aquatic Spaces and Practices
Fan Totems: Affective Investments in the Sea Creatures of Horror and Science Fiction – Brigid Cherry
Mermaid Spotting: the rise of mermaiding in popular culture – Maria Mellins
Journeys in Liquid Space: Representations of the Sea in Disney Theme Parks– Lee Brooks
Rivers of blood, Sea of bodies: An analysis of recent media coverage of migration and trafficking on the High Seas – Carole Murphy
Part 4: Screening Sea Creatures
Becoming the Shark and/vs. Controlling the Shark: Jaws Unleashed, the Animal Avatar, and Human-Animal Relationships – Michael Fuchs
Songs of the Sea: Sea Beasts and Maritime Folklore in Global Animation – Mark Fryers
Jurassic World's Mosasaurus as the saviour of the classic cinema blockbuster – Damian O'Byrne
Nessie Has Risen from the Grave – Ian Hunter

Sujets

• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Película fotográfica
• Folclore
• General officer
• Mythology
• Documentary film
• General
• Film
• Folklore

Informations

• Publié par: John Libbey Publishing
• Date de parution: 10 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780861969395
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Beasts of the Deep
Beasts of the Deep
Sea Creatures and Popular Culture
Edited by Jon Hackett and Se n Harrington
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Beasts of the Deep: Sea Creatures and Popular Culture
A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 9780 86196 733 9 (Paperback); 9780 86196 939 5 (Ebook)
Published by
John Libbey Publishing Ltd, 205 Crescent Road, East Barnet, Herts EN4 8SB, United Kingdom
e-mail: [e-mail] ; web site: www.johnlibbey.com
Distributed worldwide by Indiana University Press,
Herman B Wells Library - 350, 1320 E. 10th St., Bloomington, IN 47405, USA.
www.iupress.indiana.edu
2018 Copyright John Libbey Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved.
Unauthorised duplication contravenes applicable laws.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Beasts of the Deep
Part 1:
FOLKLORE AND WEIRD TALES
Chapter 1
From Beneath the Waves : Sea-Draugr and the Popular Conscience , Alexander Hay
Chapter 2
The Depths of our Experience: Thalassophobia and the Oceanic Horror , Se n J. Harrington
Chapter 3
From Depths of Terror to Depths of Wonder: The Sublime in Lovecraft s Call of Cthulhu and Cameron s The Abyss , Vivan Joseph
Part 2:
DEPTHS OF DESIRE
Chapter 4
Beauty and the Octopus: Close encounters with the other-than-human , Marco Beno t Carbone
Chapter 5
The Octopussy: Exploring representations of female sexuality in Victor Hugo s The Toilers of the Sea (1866) and The Laughing Man (1868) , Laura Ettenfield
Chapter 6
Psychedelic Deep Blues: the Romanticised Sea Creature in Jimi Hendrix s 1983 (A Merman I Should Turn to Be) (1968), Tim Buckley s Song to the Siren (1968) and Captain Beefheart s Grow Fins (1972) , Richard Mills
Part 3:
AQUATIC SPACES AND PRACTICES
Chapter 7
Fan Totems: Affective Investments in the Sea Creatures of Horror and Science Fiction , Brigid Cherry
Chapter 8
Mermaid Spotting: the Rise of Mermaiding in Popular Culture , Maria Mellins
Chapter 9
Adventures in Liquid Space: Representations of the Sea in Disney Theme Parks , Lee Brooks
Chapter 10
Rivers of Blood, Sea of Bodies: An Analysis of Media Coverage of Migration and Trafficking on the High Seas , Carole Murphy
Part 4:
SCREENING SEA CREATURES
Chapter 11
Becoming-Shark? Jaws Unleashed , the Animal Avatar, and Popular Culture s Eco-Politics , Michael Fuchs
Chapter 12
Songs of the Sea: Sea Beasts and Maritime Folklore in Global Animation , Mark Fryers
Chapter 13
The Mosasaurus and Immediacy in Jurassic World , Damian O Byrne
Chapter 14
Nessie Has Risen from the Grave , Kieran Foster and I. Q. Hunter
The Editors and Contributors
Acknowledgements
The editors would like to acknowledge Grow Fins , Words and Music by Don Van Vliet 1971 and reproduced by permission of EMI Music Publishing Limited, London W1F 9LD.
We would like to thank our colleagues at St Mary s University, Twickenham, without whom neither the original conference nor this volume would have been possible. First, our academic colleagues who have contributed some of the wonderfully diverse chapters in the pages that follow. One of these, Lee Brooks, has kindly provided the striking cover to this volume too. Second, our administrative and technical support staff, particularly Susanne Gilbert and Fallon Parker, whose contributions to our conference schedules have been imaginative and invaluable.
We also wish to thank Rupert Norfolk, our talented and dedicated illustrator, who provided us with the wonderful images for this collection.
Introduction
Beasts of the Deep
D iscussing recent scholarly trends, Asa Mittman observes that in the space of a few years, the study of monsters has moved from the absolute periphery - perhaps its logical starting point - to a much more central position in academia (2012: 1). Beasts of the Deep: Sea Creatures and Popular Culture aims to focus attention within this field of enquiry to the sea and its beastly inhabitants, in the widest sense. Most of the chapters in this volume emerge from the proceedings of a conference on 4 June 2016 at St Mary s University, Twickenham. As with the conference in 2016, this volume presents an eclectic and insightful collection of research findings, from a number of disciplines and interpretive frameworks.
There are a number of recent academic works directly addressing monstrosity, both monographs (such as Halberstam, 1995; Kearney, 2003; Asma, 2009; and Wright, 2013) and edited collections (such as Cohen, 1997; Mittman Dendle, 1997; Levina Bui, 2013; and Hunt, Lockyer Williamson, 2013; these lists are not intended to be exhaustive). However, academic books specifically addressing the sea in relation to monstrosity in popular culture are lacking, to the editors knowledge. This collection seeks to address this deficiency, while broadening analysis to as diverse a range of media as possible. This introduction will mostly outline the research focus of the individual chapters. However, it will be pertinent before this to highlight some of the main themes that emerge across the chapters - and that were encouraged in the original call for papers for our conference.
First, many of the chapters, perhaps especially in the section on Folklore and Weird Tales , address the mythical resonance of the sea and its creatures. That is, no matter how questionable the appeal to essential qualities or meanings, nonetheless the sea is often used to signify timelessness or sublimity, the archaic and the prehistoric. Many representations in myth, literature and more recent film and television draw on this cultural resonance - and authors in the first section of this volume in particular consider how to conceptualise this aspect of marine representations, from a number of perspectives.
Equally, appeals to the archaic and eternal can be vague and ineffable without reference to concrete historical context of the production and reception of media and cultural texts. Each of the authors in this volume has contextualised the texts and practices under consideration here in relation to the wider social, cultural, industrial and political contexts in which they are inserted and from which they have emerged. The section on Depths of Desire locates texts on desiring and the sea in relation both to cultural traditions as well as the wider social and gendered contexts of reception. Aquatic Spaces and Practices extends analysis to cultural geography, news media, fandom and tourism contexts and provides perhaps the most diverse range of research frameworks in the volume as a whole.
One of the main concerns for the editors (and conference convenors) was to focus discussion on the medium specificity of texts that represent the sea. Of course, it has been noted recently that media convergence challenges simple notions that particular media have formal elements that can be analysed in isolation from other media (see Lister, Dovey, Giddings, Grant Kelly, 2003: 384). This proviso granted, we wish to ask nonetheless: how do film, television or literature (to take just three) do the sea and its creatures? What are the particular challenges associated with representing the marine environment and sea creatures that derive from the formal aspects of media in any given era? Such questions are a constant concern in the final section, Screening Sea Creatures , but they are implicit in many of the other chapters that have appeared earlier in the volume.
This collection does not aim for an exhaustive analysis of monstrosity as a concept, so much as to open up the cultural analysis of the sea and sea creatures through a diverse set of case studies. Many analyses of monstrosity derive the term from the Latin, monstrare , to show , following the analyses of Michel Foucault (see discussion in Baldick, 1987: 10), among others. On this definition, monsters serve as symptoms, portents or warnings. If so, monsters - including those of the sea (or indeed the sea as monster) - call for further analysis in order to elucidate the cultural work they are called on to perform.
The sea and its creatures represent a number of overlapping functions in the chapters that follow. First, they offer an evident mythical resource on which to draw, either to explore myths directly or to draw on their connotations in order to fashion new representations of sea creatures. Second, the sea and the depths can be used as a figure for the unrepresentable, the sublime or the ineffable. Taken together, these first two functions are particularly evident in the first section of this book, Folklore and Weird Tales . More obviously, perhaps, the sea and its creatures provide numerous opportunities for antagonists, given the importance of hero narratives to popular culture.
Just as importantly, the sea and its creatures provide tropes for representing various social or cultural concerns. In this volume, the essays in the second section, Depths of Desire , highlight the versatility of such imagery for figuring desire, specifically in gendered terms, in diverse media. The essay by Carole Murphy in the third section, Aquatic Spaces and Practices , discusses the media s negative construction of refugees through analysis of discourses that draw on aquatic imagery. More benignly, the sea and its beasts can also be the basis for various practices that use them as a starting point for subcultural or fan activities. The third section of this book also covers these usages.
Finally, we might say that the sea and its beasts provide an opportunity to showcase