Poison and Poisoning in Science, Fiction and Cinema

Precarious Identities

Heike Klippel, Bettina Wahrig, Anke Zechner, Heike Klippel, Bettina Wahrig, Anke Zechner

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783319649092
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

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.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Editors and Contributors
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• Part I Cases and Environments
• Female Poisoners in Eighteenth-Century Germany
• The Truth About the Lafarge Affair: Poisons in Salons, Academies, and Courtrooms During the Nineteenth Century
• “Nature Is Lopsided”: Muscarine as Scientific and Literary Fascinosum in Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Documents in the Case
• “Everything Stays Down Where It’s Wounded”: Precarious Ontologies and Ecologies of Poison
• Part II Metamorphoses
• “Life and Death Appeared to Me Ideal Bounds”: Investigations into Life, Death, Resuscitation, and “Vegetable Poisons” in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain
• “These Pale Alchemies”: Lucretia Borgia in Nineteenth-Century Literature
• Magic Matters: On Sexed Bodies and Early Film
• Fun and Games: The Joy of Poisoning in Children’s Literature
• Nuclear Power Subjects: Superheroes and Energetic Film
• Part III Visualizing the Invisible
• From Substance to Phantasm: Poison Motifs in Narrative Cinema
• Cinema and the Motif of Poison as Intermingling
• Serial Poisoning: Actualizations of the “Yellow Peril” in 1960s Fu Manchu Films
• Cinema as Ontoxicological Mit-Gift and Being-With as a Given in Societies of Enforced Precarity
• Autoimmunity and Sexual Difference in Todd Haynes’ Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, Poison, and Safe
• Part IV Conclusion
• Identity, Precariousness, and Poison: A Brief and Political Outlook
• Index