The freak show is back. Monsters are all the rage in recent scholarship, where they appear in the service of a range of historical and theoretical arguments. Inspired by Leslie Fiedler's Freaks (Simon & Schuster, 1978), studies such as Marie-Helene Huet's Monstrous Imagination (Harvard, 1993), Robert Bogdan's Freak Show (Chicago, 1988), Rosemarie Garland Thomsonâ•˙s Extraordinary Bodies (Columbia, 1997), and the anthologies Freakery (New York, 1996) and Monster Theory (Minnesota, 1996), to name a very few, link monsters to issues as varied as reproduction, imperialism, artistic creation, carnival, spectacle, and the rise of mass culture. Reading the monster as the ultimate other, a being whose shocking flaws stage an uncanny commentary on whatâ•˙s "normal," current monster work has come to form a significant strand of cultural studies' ongoing dissection of the power dynamics of modern societies, the politics of representation, and the social construction of the self. Dennis Todd's Imagining Monsters provides an astute, entertaining, and informative contribution to this discussion. Building his study on the celebrated case of Mary Toft, a poor English woman who claimed to have given birth to seventeen rabbits in the fall of 1726, Todd assembles a textured, nuanced account of how monstrosity in general, and the Toft case in particular, intersected with contemporary ideas about the mind, the body, and the always vexed and uncertain relationship between the two.

Centering his investigation on eighteenth-century concepts of the imagination, Toddâ•˙s study ranges from the Toft case to medical and psychological debates about the causes of birth defects, to the fiction, poetry, and letters of Swift and Pope. Imagining Monsters begins with a detailed account of Mary Toft's alleged monstrous births, a remarkable set-piece that enables Todd to lay out the central concerns of his book: Why was the Toft case so fascinating to doctors and laymen alike? What was it about her hoax -- stuffing pieces of dead rabbits deep into her vagina and then birthing them with doctors in attendance -- that was so compelling and controversial? Why, in particular, did anyone believe her -- for many did, including several of the experts who attended her. Todd explains that according to Mary Toft and her doctors, she was suffering from a classic case of "maternal impression;" in other words, Mary Toft gave birth to seventeen rabbits because she was obsessed with rabbits while she was pregnant. This is the crux of Todd's argument, which contends that Mary Toft's alleged ability to convert a potentially sentient being into so much monstrous, insensate matter simply by dreaming of and longing for rabbits represented the power of the imagination to overwhelm, and even annihilate, body and mind. Both a study of eighteenth-century notions of deformity and an analysis of eighteenth-century models of mind, Imagining Monsters is as much about imagining as it is about monsters. Indeed, it is ultimately less interested in what people used to think about monsters, than it is in what monsters can tell us about Enlightenment ideas of selfhood.

Imagining Monsters argues that monstrosity ultimately expressed a series of epistemological confusions that were central to eighteenth-century notions of imagination, creation, and identity. The first half of the book illuminates the specific anxieties sparked by the Toft hoax, showing how it provoked the first systematic interrogation of the doctrine of maternal impression, and exploring how both popular and scientific accounts of the case framed monstrous birth as a perilous breach of psychic, bodily, and ontological boundaries. Locating concerns about personal erasure and categorical disorder in everything from Daniel Turner and James Blondel's teratological debates to broadsheet verse to Hogarth's prints to the Scriblerians writings, Todd shows how theories of monstrosity were always also theories of representation: in the early decades of the eighteenth century, specific concerns about maternal impression were inextricably linked to broader anxieties about image-making, writing, and the instabilities of language. The final chapters develop this idea, concentrating on how monstrosity functions in Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Pope's Dunciad. For both Swift and Pope, monstrosity not only operates as a foil for analyzing the terms upon which selves are established as selves; it also allows each writer to explore the place of imagination -- particularly as it manifests itself in textual production -- in identity formation. Imagining Monsters ends with a discussion of Pope's own anxieties of authorship, concentrating on his discomfiting awareness that his own deformity was deeply implicated in his capacity to shape monstrosity on the page.

At once a work of medical history, literary criticism, and cultural history, this is interdisciplinary work of the first order -- dense, particular, theoretically sophisticated, and wide-ranging scholarship that will interest historians and literary critics alike. The range of sources, the careful contextualization, and the subtlety of close reading are the real strengths of this book. Todd takes his time, allowing his argument to evolve gradually over the space of nearly three hundred closely argued pages. The result is a striking series of intricately woven readings that combine to develop a picture of eighteenth-century culture as convincing as it is strange.

The only weakness -- if weakness it can be called -- exists in the book's framing. Beginning as a cultural history of the Toft case and ending as a psychoanalytic account of Pope, Imagining Monsters seems at times to suffer from an identic ambivalence rather like the one it so elegantly uncovers in eighteenth-century thought. This is a study that is reluctant to say just exactly what it is: there is no real introduction (a detailed narrative of the Toft case stands in for a more comprehensive outline of the bookâ•˙s argument), and no conclusion, something a study of such range sorely requires. The effect can be frustrating. Because moments of synthesis are rare, the body of Imagining Monsters appears to grow away from itself as it develops, metamorphosing (like monsters themselves) in ways that can be confusing for an audience accustomed to more tightly shaped arguments. Even so, the sprawling scope of Imagining Monsters has its advantages -- like any worthwhile defect, it draws the audience in, makes it think, and is, as a result, well worth the attention it commands. Besides, a slight case of formal discontinuity is peculiarly fitting for a book whose major claims center on the textual and physical deformations caused by overactive and controlling imaginations.