A Miéville Bestiary: Monsters as Commentary on the Hybridity of Real and Conceptual Landscapes in the Work of China Miéville.

To date, China Miéville has written: 12 novels; two short story collections; four volumes of non-fiction; graphic novels; roleplaying games and numerous essays and articles in a writing career spanning since the late 1990s.

Miéville’s novels are celebrated for being distinctly different from each other yet there are three concepts of landscapes which Miéville keeps revisiting: genre landscapes, urban landscapes and socio-political landscapes. This thesis will explore the theoretical approaches Miéville utilises to explore these conceptual landscapes before using the form of the bestiary to highlight how these concepts are manifested in his novels.

The most important of those fantastical elements at his disposal is the monster which naturally encourages an examination of hybridity and liminality. The Bestiary has existed in the form that is familiar to us for many centuries. The interweaving of morality and mysterious depictions of the natural world imbued historical bestiaries with a sense of the mythological. Their power as a device for world creation is particularly recognised by writers of fantasy fiction. This thesis will demonstrate that by using monsters as manifestations of these conceptual landscapes Miéville successfully utilises the hybridity and liminality of both monsters and fantastic fiction as a methodology to critique our own contemporary late-capitalist social landscape.

Key Words: Miéville, monsters, bestiary, hybridity, genre, Weird, psychogeography, Marxism.