Examines images of horror in Victorian fiction, criticism, and philosophy. Focusing on the recurring metaphor of Medusa’s head, The Medusa Effect examines images of horror in texts by Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, and a series of Victorian artists and critics writing about aesthetics. Through nuanced and innovative readings of canonical works by Freud, Nietzsche, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, A. C. Swinburne, and George Eliot, Thomas Albrecht demonstrates the twofold nature of these writers’ images of horror. On the one hand, the analysis illuminates how the representation of something seen as horrifying—for instance, a disturbing work of art, an existential insight, or a recognition of the fundamental inaccessibility of another person’s consciousness—can serve a protective purpose, to defend the writer in some way against the horror he or she encounters. On the other hand, the representations themselves can be a potential threat—epistemologically unreliable, for instance, or illusory, deceptive, fundamentally unstable, and potentially dangerous to the writers. Through a psychoanalytically informed literary analysis, The Medusa Effect explores crucial ethical and epistemological questions of Victorian aesthetics, as well as underexamined complexities of the mechanisms of Victorian literary representation. “ an elegant study in rhetorical analysis.” — Victorian Studies “Thomas Albrecht brings a radically different approach to aesthetics—psychoanalytic and poststructuralist rather than historicist—in The Medusa Effect.” — Studies in English Literature

Medusa - an experimental spaceship developed by the Advanced Research Department of St Oscar's University. Missing since it was launched, presumed lost in the wars, it was a project so secret that it has never been declassified. Now, twenty years on, Medusa is coming home. After one of the investigation team dies suspiciously, Professor Bernice Summerfield is assigned to help discover what went wrong. But to do so she must solve a riddle. What is the strange link between the original crew and the team now on board the drifting ship? And why do their ghosts still haunt Medusa?

In traditional mythology and iconography, Medusa's killing powers are attributed to visual means: the monster is slain for her looks and her effect is to kill men for looking at her. Challenging the familiar account of the modern era as ocularcentric, this book reads the Medusa-effect on the philosophy of the modern research university as rooted in an audiocentric fantasy. Author Dawne McCance links phonocentrism to an aural imaginary by tracking the trope—and terror—of the deaf ear and mute mouth in the discourse on the university that was inaugurated by Kant and that extends through Hegel and Heidegger to the present. She shows how, repeatedly, in founding texts on the modern research university, the philosopher's fearful recoil from an animal-female figure that he defines as deaf and dumb has the effect—the Medusa-effect—of cutting off his own, and therefore the institution's, ear and tongue. McCance also considers some recent efforts to shake the modern institution out of its Medusa-effect petrification.

Fascinating and terrifying, the Medusa story has long been a powerful signifier in culture with poets, feminists, anthropologists, psychoanalysts, political theorists, artists, writers, and others. Bringing together the essential passages and commentary about Medusa, The Medusa Reader traces her through the ages, from classical times through the Renaissance to the pop culture, art, and fashion of today. This collection, with a critical introduction and striking illustrations, is the first major anthology of primary material and critical commentary on this most provocative and enigmatic of figures.

On the arts and postmodernism

With her repulsive face and head full of living, venomous snakes, Medusa is petrifying—quite literally, since looking directly at her turned people to stone. Ever since Perseus cut off her head and presented it to Athena, she has been a woman of many forms: a dangerous female monster that had to be destroyed, an erotic power that could annihilate men, and, thanks to Freud, a woman whose hair was a nest of terrifying penises that signaled castration. She has been immortalized by artists from Leonardo da Vinci to Salvador Dalí and was the emblem of the Jacobins after the French Revolution. Today, she’s viewed by feminists as a noble victim of patriarchy and used by Versace in the designer’s logo for men’s underwear, haute couture, and exotic dinnerware. She even gives her name to a sushi roll on a Disney resort menu. Why does Medusa continue to have this power to transfix us? David Leeming seeks to answer this question in Medusa, a biography of the mythical creature. Searching for the origins of Medusa’s myth in cultures that predate ancient Greece, Leeming explores how and why the mythical figure of the gorgon has become one of the most important and enduring ideas in human history. From an oil painting by Caravaggio to Clash of the Titans and Dungeons and Dragons, he delves into the many depictions of Medusa, ultimately revealing that her story is a cultural dream that continues to change and develop with each new era. Asking what the evolution of the Medusa myth discloses about our culture and ourselves, this book paints an illuminating portrait of a woman who has never ceased to enthrall.

Exploring literary fascination as a key concept of aesthetic attraction, this book illuminates the ways in which literary texts are designed, presented, and received. Detailed case studies include texts by William Shakespeare, S.T. Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Don DeLillo, and Ian McEwan.

A pilot races through the sky to stop a nuclear catastrophe in this “compelling” thriller by the New York Times–bestselling author of Pandora’s Clock (People). Vivian Henry hasn’t heard her ex-husband’s voice in three years, but it still fills her with fear. Dangerous and brilliant, Dr. Rogers Henry is calling because he’s dying. He offers Vivian a fortune in insurance money if she’ll carry out one final task for him: Take the Medusa device to Washington, DC. The Medusa is his life’s work—a thermonuclear bomb capable of knocking out all modern technology in the country—and he wants her to deliver it to the Pentagon before it falls into the wrong hands. Cargo plane captain Scott McKay is miles above the ground when the Medusa begins to speak. A recording of Dr. Henry’s voice announces that the device is active and about to explode. With nowhere to land, Captain McKay must rely on his instincts and fly like he has never flown before to prevent a worldwide apocalypse. Medusa’s Child proves once again that John Nance is the “king of the modern-day aviation thriller” (Publishers Weekly).

Routledge International Handbook of Dramatherapy is the first book of its kind to bring together leading professionals and academics from around the world to discuss their practice from a truly international perspective. Dramatherapy has developed as a profession during the latter half of the twentieth century. Now, we are beginning to see its universal reach across the globe in a range of different and diverse approaches. From Australia, to Korea to the Middle East and Africa through Europe and into North & South America dramatherapists are developing a range of working practices using the curative power of drama within a therapeutic context to work with diverse and wide ranging populations. Using traditional texts in the Indian sub-continent, healing performances in the Cameroon, supporting conflict in Israel and Palestine, through traditional Comedic theatre in Italy, to adolescents in schools and adults with mental ill health, this handbook covers a range of topics that shows the breadth, depth and strength of dramatherapy as a developing and maturing profession. It is divided into four main sections that look at the current international: Developments in dramatherapy Theoretical approaches Specific practice New and innovative approaches Offering insights on embodiment, shamanism, anthropology and cognitive approaches coupled with a range of creative, theatrical and therapeutic methods, this ground breaking book is the first congruent analysis of the profession. It will appeal to a wide and diverse international community of educators, academics, practitioners, students, training schools and professionals within the arts, arts education and arts therapies communities. Additionally it will be of benefit to teachers and departments in charge of pastoral and social care within schools and colleges.