Review of Monsters, Gender, and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature by Dana Oswald

The perceived gender, overt sexuality, and frightening reproductive potential of medieval monsters are placed under the cultural mico- and macro-scope in this revised dissertations, an ambitious and provocative (if sometimes self-limited) addition to the growing field of monster studies. As with most recent explorations in the filed, Dana Oswald's argument (repeated with force and regularity throughout) relives heavily on the work of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, focusing on monsters as embodiments of cultural anxiety. However, the haunting traces of monstrosity collected by Oswald lead her to proclaim that not only does the monster always escape (as theorized by Cohen), but that "the monster always returns" (p.18, for example), thus further emphasizing the particularly sexual anxieties that this collection of "human monsters" embody.