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Poison and Poisoning in Science, Fiction and Cinema
Precarious Identities
Edited by Heike Klippel, Bettina Wahrig and Anke Zechner
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Book Presentation:
This book is about poison and poisonings; it explores the facts, fears and fictions that surround this fascinating topic. Poisons attract attention because they are both dangerous and hard to discover. Secretive and invisible, they are a challenging object of representation. How do science studies, literature, and especially film―the medium of the visible―explain and show what is hidden? How can we deal with uncertainties emerging from the ambivalence of dangerous substances? These considerations lead the editors of this volume to the notion of “precarious identities” as a key discursive marker of poisons and related substances. This book is unique in facilitating a multi-faceted conversation between disciplines. It draws on examples from historical cases of poisoning; figurations of uncertainty and blurred boundaries in literature; and cinematic examples, from early cinema and arthouse to documentary and blockbuster. The contributions work with concepts from gender studies, new materialism, post-colonialism, deconstructivism, motif studies, and discourse analysis.
About the authors:
Heike Klippel is Professor of Film Studies at the Braunschweig University of Art, Germany. Anke Zechner was a research fellow on the DFG project “The Poison Motif in Film” and is currently working on a research project on Poisonous Cinema.Bettina Wahrig is Professor of the History of Science and Pharmacy at Braunschweig University of Technology, Germany.
Press Reviews:
"With the recent advances in genetics and forensic science, this book placing poisoning in historical and cultural context makes a welcome contribution. Through careful analyses, the contributors to this volume examine the ways that fiction-writers and film-makers have used poisons to structure their artistic works. Their studies bring together literary analysis and the history of science to reveal the cultural uses of ‘precarious substances’ that destabilize complex organisms." (Laura Otis, Historian of Science and Professor of English, Emory University, USA)
"This is a much needed book in times of toxic media-ecologies. With much elegance, the essays unfold the rich history of precarious objects and subjects we all seem to have become." (Karin Harrasser, Professor for Cultural Theory, University of Art and Design Linz, Austria)
See the publisher website: Palgrave MacMillan
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