[Series] Muses and Monsters

NOTE: This page is intended as a thematic overview of the meetups in the series, but is not itself a meetup. To RSVP, please see the individual events as they are announced on the Wisdom and Woe calendar. This page will be updated regularly to reflect changes to the schedule.

In 1790, Edmund Burke addressed the claim that "giants, magicians, fairies, and heroes" had "exhausted [their] credulity." Yet, in 1846, William John Thoms wrote that "belief in fairies is by no means extinct in England," and the literal existence of fairies was defended into the 20th century by the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle.

Scientific developments had challenged religious authority and a belief in the supernatural, but they had also shifted the frontier between the credible and incredible: archaic mythological monsters (like Leviathan and Behemoth) could be comprehended anew via Darwin's theory of evolution, and the quest for fairies could be investigated empirically.

Meanwhile, 19th century aesthetic theory embraced heightened realities--what Coleridge famously described as "the suspension of disbelief." According to Italo Calvino, the "supernatural element" in the tales of this era "appears freighted with meaning, like the revolt of the unconscious, the repressed, the forgotten, all that is distanced from our rational attention." Occupying "the same ground as philosophic speculation: its theme is the relationship between the reality of the world we live in and know through perception and the reality of the world of thought that lives within us and directs us."

Far from receding into obsolescence, muses and monsters help dramatize modern fantasies and anxieties: probing the limits of knowledge and life, while addressing deep-seated questions of race, gender, spirituality, and animality.

"Girls danced and sang; and tales of fairy times were told; of monstrous imps, and youths enchanted; of groves and gardens in the sea." (Mardi, 1.64)

Series schedule:

• Faerie Queene: Spenser - 8/28, 9/4, 9/11, 9/18, 9/25, 10/2
• Concerning Certain Sea Monsters: Pontoppidan - 10/6 (Thu)
• The Kraken and other poems: Tennyson - 10/9
• The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains: Frederick Marryat - 10/13 (Thu)
• The Bell Tower - 10/16
• Tales of Blue Water: Arthur Conan Doyle - 10/23
• The Boats of the "Glen Carrig": William Hope Hodgson - 10/30
• Fairies, Nymphs, and Ogres: Leigh Hunt - 11/6
• Anatomy of Melancholy: Burton - 11/13
• Lamia: Keats, A.S. Byatt - 11/17 (Thu)
• The Piazza + pizza - 11/20
• Undine: Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué - 11/27
• Paracelsus: Robert Browning - 12/4
• Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon: Jung - 12/11
• The Alchemist: Ben Jonson - 12/18
• Frankenstein: Mary Shelley - 1/1
• The Monster: Stephen Crane - 1/8
• Oberlus the Hermit - 1/15
• Benito Cereno - 1/22
• The Invisible Man: Ralph Ellison - 1/29, 2/5, 2/12
• Middle Passage: Charles Johnson - 2/19, 2/26
• Muses and Monsters (cont.)

For further exploration:

• Immortal Monster: The Mythological Evolution of the Fantastic Beast in Modern Fiction and Film by Joseph D. Andriano
• "The Unexpected Origins of the Word ‘Monster’"