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.
"Uncanny Bodies is an innovative and thoroughly original exploration of the embodieduncanny. Each work in the collection raises urgent questions about how we relate to and experienceour bodies. Echoing Freud’s use of “The Sandman” as a prism through which to view the uncanny, thiscollection challenges the reader to interact with the uncanny from both an analytical and a creativeperspective. This is a collection that will, undoubtedly, have a broad appeal. It can be treated as ananthology, a dynamic compilation of scholarly and creative works, and read for pleasure. However,Uncanny Bodies will also intrigue researchers working on topics such as embodiment, the Gothic,gender, Horror and Science fiction. Many of its essays, including Haddow’s discussion of the cyborg,Catanzariti’s history of affective recognition, and Vassilis Galanos’s chronology of the uncanny valley,serve as informative overviews of their respective topics. For this reason, Uncanny Bodies may alsoappeal to teachers. The individual essays not only explain, clearly and concisely, difficult conceptsrelated to embodiment and uncanniness, but they can also be easily paired with one of the manyrelevant creative works included in the collection. Uncanny Bodies is a unique intervention in thestudy of embodiment. A hybrid of art and scholarship, this is a book that challenges disciplinarycategories and forces us to reconsider the familiar space of the body." Fantastika Journal, Vol. 6, Issue 1, Feb 2022.
