OUT 4 August 2020
One hundred years ago Freud’s definition of the uncanny was ‘not the strange, but the familiar become strange’. In this anthology of new work from a range of writers and academics, the uncanny is a place where you feel at home – until home turns against you. It’s a city where the streets can’t join up. The uncanny alienates your own body from you through medical advances, such as prosthetic limbs or cardiac defibrillators. The ‘uncanny valley’ is a landscape where robots try to imitate you.
This anthology gets beneath the skin and into the depths of what it means to be human in an age of machines and genes.
Featuring papers and stories from Pippa Goldschmidt, Gill Haddow, Fadhila Mazanderani, Jane Alexander, Ruth Aylett, Christine De Luca, Vassilis Galanos, Jules Horne, Donna McCormack, Aoife S. McKenna, Jane McKie, nicky melville, Dilys Rose, Naomi Salman, Helen Sedgwick, Sarah Stewart, Alice Tarbuck, Clare Uytman, Sara Wasson, Neil Williamson and Eris Young.
Uncanny Bodies
"Quite the surprising and engaging literary ride." - Nothing in the Rulebook
"Uncanny Bodies goes further than reiterating familiar discourses of languages. Combining visceral storytelling, perceptive analysis, haunting poetic and dramatic writing, the collection, which is highly recommended to all scholars working on the uncanny, as well as general readers who like being unsettled by what they read, produces an authentic uncanny experience, as many, if not all the texts, will resonate with familiar anxieties and hidden traumas. While the disquieting effect may stay within us for some time, as Sara Wasson intimates, the collection is also an invitation to bring the uncanny body out, and ‘show the shadows’" Monica Germana for The Bottle Imp.
