The Greeks created a culture that seemed secure and well ordered, in which status, gender and identity appeared to be if not fixed, then at least clear cut. A free man knew his place and his privileges, a foreigner was aware of their disabilities, an enslaved woman had a fair idea of her lot, a worker in the mines of Laureion even more so. Yet, lived experience was precarious. The rich man could lose his fortune, the highborn girl could become shipwrecked and enslaved. These are not just the plot devices of Hellenistic novels; they are the potential experiences of men and women for whom vulnerability and impermanence were as real as wealth and good fortune. These conditions favoured expressions – stories and images in particular – that made change and anomaly part of the cultural repertoire of the Greeks. This is perhaps why the vivid, vibrant hybrids of the Greek imagination attracted so much attention from Christian writers. By imagining other ways of engaging with the world and offering alternatives to the settled convention, hybrids would always be a threat to those attempting to impose their order. Hybrids became demons to be slain.

Chapter 4 fundamentally rethinks the identity of “composite” or “hybrid” creatures as they were embodied and experienced in Crete and the southern Cyclades from the late third to mid-second millennium BCE. I argue that, when pondered closely and in their contexts, many of the creatures to which we apply this label in fact would have been experienced not as counterintuitive compounds of body parts stemming from other species, but, instead, as whole beings that were perceived as being similar to a range of other creatures. These lines of similitude could concern matters of form as well as other aspects of the creatures’ natures (e.g., color, efficacies). With this, the traditional category of the “composite” being is set aside as a larger swath of interconnected creatures comes into view. These remarkable creatures share amongst them the quality of having apparent connections both beyond the Aegean, with thingly embodiments of beasts from overseas, and more locally, with other Aegean fabricated and biological animals. An iconic creature of the Aegean Bronze Age, the griffin, provides a jumping off point for different parts of this discussion, as we reconsider the creativity realized in such beasts.

While Statius’ interventions in the poem seem to encourage a comparison between the poem’s characters and Virgil’s heroes, Chapter 2 shows that the Thebaid actually patterns its heroic narratives after some of the most politically charged myths of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, such as the stories of Cadmus, Perseus, Hercules, and Theseus. Statius’ descriptions of dysfunctional heroes, who re-tread the failure of their Ovidian ancestors to carry on the foundational mission of Virgil’s Hercules and Aeneas, seem to rework the anti-heroic paradigm set by Ovid’s Cadmus (Met. 3–4). By exploring the darker sides of the Aeneid’s gigantomachic discourse, these narratives open the Thebaid to a redefinition of traditional heroic paradigms that potentially questions the political significance of the heroes appropriated by the Flavian emperors in their refashioning of Augustan ideology. While offering new insights into Statius’ renegotiation of poetic independence from his predecessors, this exploration also illuminates the Thebaid’s sophisticated engagement with the material and ideological environments of Flavian Rome.

Heralded as the decade that launched the “Golden Age” of children’s literature, the 1860s saw the growth of fairy tales, fantasy, and imperial romance, and concerns about education and empire. The 1860s major children’s fantasy works, Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market[GK2] [GK3](1862), Charles Kingsley’s Water-Babies [GK4](1863), and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland [GK5](1865), share striking similarities. The trope of unstable ground in these texts offers insight into the anxieties of the era with implications for education and imperial stewardship. The unearthing of fossils along with debates over Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species[GK6] (1859) created unease about the unknown and disrupted established knowledge about the timeline for creation. Carroll’s, Kingsley’s, and Rossetti’s texts reveal uncertainties of science (especially the newly articulated domains of geology, paleontology, archeology, and geography), the inadequacies of education, and the legacy of empire. In their hands, unstable ground is not only a plot device and a metaphor, but a warning.

In this chapter, the contributions of the minoritized languages Zazaki and Uyghur shore up a theoretical battle for philosophical ‘monsters’, specifically introducing radical revisions to semantic models of reported speech and attitude reports. In particular, these languages exhibit the phenomenon of indexical shift, whereby elements such as first-person pronouns in indirect quotations can refer to the matrix subject (and not the speaker themself), although with highly intricate constraints on when, some language-specific and some apparently universal.

This chapter looks at how the postcolonial negotiates the Gothic. Both are informed by a degree of suspicion about European Enlightenment rationalism and its constructs, but the Gothic also depends on colonial European elements – the Devil as Black, the Oriental artefact, obeah – for its effects. The postcolonial Gothic needs these effects – for the scream, as I argue, is central to the Gothic – but cannot use the same instruments because, by definition, postcolonialism adopts a critical and questioning attitude to colonial European discourses as well. By looking at a number of texts, especially the Caribbean Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, the South African André Brink’s Devil’s Valley, the Australian Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, and the British-Indian Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, I show how the Gothic villain or the Gothic secret is manipulated by postcolonialism to combine its critical perspectives with the Gothic’s generic requirements.

Hard times for Babylon followed the end of the First Dynasty; but records of two Sealand kings, and the account of magnificent rebuilding of Marduk’s temple by a Kassite king imply wealth and energy. Glass production brought a new source of wealth, and horses were bred for chariots. Marduk was still the supreme god. The top status of the Kassite kings in Babylon was recognized by the pharaohs in Egypt. There cuneiform was used for international correspondence and Babylonian literature used to train local scribes. Foreign wives were taken from Elamite, Assyrian, and Hittite royalty. A top scribe from Babylon served in Assyria, and literature flourished. Boulders recording donations of land were carved with texts and celestial motifs. The office of eunuch is discussed. The Assyrian king raided Babylon, looting literary tablets among other valuables. He took over rule of Bahrain to access Gulf trade. The Kassite kings soon resumed the dynasty but the Elamite king raided and in turn took huge amounts of booty. In the next dynasty, the great Nebuchadnezzar I defeated Elam and wrote a heroic account. As a result of tribal incursions by Arameans, the Aramaic language began to spread, and camels trained for transport opened up desert trade. A library already existed in Babylon.

Many critics struggle with defining the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as the novel offers a combined monstrosity–deformity concept that blurs the distinctions between moral and physical attributes. The critical focus on categorization, however, marginalizes Shelley’s interest in the ethics of looking, and, in particular, her interest in how looking constructs monstrosity/deformity. The novel reveals the failure of transformative vision in the case of monstrosity and deformity, and invites sympathy for the object of such failure by reiterating instances in which the uncanny is familiarized and vision is changed. The creature’s brief encounter with a blind character offers an opportunity for transformative listening, but this goes awry, and reinforces the central tragedy of the novel.

Despite Homeric emphasis on male heroism, women and female divinities play central roles in both poems.

The Gothic usually unfolds as an uncanny eruption of a past that refuses to stay buried and forgotten, and, as such, it is a primary way that New Orleans grapples publicly with the more disturbing aspects of its history. The Gothic is surely at the center of the city’s meaning for contemporary tourists, on one hand, and, on the other, much of its most cherished literature, from William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams to Lafcadio Hearn and George Washington Cable, is rooted in the Gothic. None of these figures, however, have reached audiences on the scale that Anne Rice’s New Orleans novels have, for these quintessentially Gothic tales have come, for many hundreds of thousands of readers, to equate the city with vampires, a figure that has an obvious symbolic resonance with the slave-owning class that controlled the city for generations, to say nothing of the city’s associations with non-heteronormative sexuality.