Poison and Poisoning in Science, Fiction and Cinema

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xviii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Heike Klippel, Bettina Wahrig, Anke Zechner

   Pages 1-11

3. Cases and Environments

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 13-13

      PDF

   2. Female Poisoners in Eighteenth-Century Germany

      • Julia Saatz

      Pages 15-36

   3. The Truth About the Lafarge Affair: Poisons in Salons, Academies, and Courtrooms During the Nineteenth Century

      • José Ramón Bertomeu-Sánchez

      Pages 37-56

   4. “Nature Is Lopsided”: Muscarine as Scientific and Literary Fascinosum in Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Documents in the Case

      • Bettina Wahrig

      Pages 57-73

   5. “Everything Stays Down Where It’s Wounded”: Precarious Ontologies and Ecologies of Poison

      • Stephan Trinkaus

      Pages 75-86

4. Metamorphoses

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 87-87

      PDF

   2. “Life and Death Appeared to Me Ideal Bounds”: Investigations into Life, Death, Resuscitation, and “Vegetable Poisons” in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain

      • Silvia Micheletti

      Pages 89-102

   3. “These Pale Alchemies”: Lucretia Borgia in Nineteenth-Century Literature

      • Martina Mittag

      Pages 103-118

   4. Magic Matters: On Sexed Bodies and Early Film

      • Kathrin Peters

      Pages 119-134

   5. Fun and Games: The Joy of Poisoning in Children’s Literature

      • Sylvia A. Pamboukian

      Pages 135-145

   6. Nuclear Power Subjects: Superheroes and Energetic Film

      • André Wendler

      Pages 147-156

5. Visualizing the Invisible

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 157-157

      PDF

   2. From Substance to Phantasm: Poison Motifs in Narrative Cinema

      • Heike Klippel

      Pages 159-175

   3. Cinema and the Motif of Poison as Intermingling

      • Anke Zechner

      Pages 177-189

   4. Serial Poisoning: Actualizations of the “Yellow Peril” in 1960s Fu Manchu Films

      • Maja Figge

      Pages 191-209

   5. Cinema as Ontoxicological Mit-Gift and Being-With as a Given in Societies of Enforced Precarity

      • Drehli Robnik

      Pages 211-222

   6. Autoimmunity and Sexual Difference in Todd Haynes’ Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, Poison, and Safe

      • Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky

      Pages 223-236

6. Conclusion

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 237-237

      PDF

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.

 

• poison on screen
• poison in a transdisciplinary context
• history of science
• history of poison
• poison as precarious
• fears of poison
• science on screen
• dangerous substances in film
• historical cases of poisoning
• motif studies

“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)

• Braunschweig University of Art , Braunschweig, Germany

  Heike Klippel

• Braunschweig University of Technology , Braunschweig, Germany

  Bettina Wahrig

• Frankfurt a.M., Germany

  Anke Zechner

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. 

Policies and ethics