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.

Examines poisons and related substances in a transdisciplinary context, comprising the history of science, literature and film studies

Conceptualizes poison as "precarious". This innovative perspective highlights poison as a medium of undermining identity and society and takes poison as a metaphor for social instability

The contributions in the volume cover a wide range from prominent court cases, including the Lafarge affair, to scientific disputes, literary analyses and cutting-edge theory

1.Introduction - Heike Klippel, Bettina Wahrig, Anke Zechner.- 2. Cases and Environments: Female Poisoners in Eighteenth-Century Germany - Julia Saatz.- 3. The Truth About the Lafarge Affair: Controversies and Poisons in Salons and Academies - José Bertomeu Sanchez.- 4. "Nature is Lopsided": Muscarine as Scientific and Literary Fascinosum - Bettina Wahrig.- 5. "Everything stays down where it's wounded": Precarious Ontologies and Ecologies of Poison - Stephan Trinkaus.- 6. Metamorphoses: "Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds": Investigations into Life, Death, Resuscitation and "Vegetable Poisons" in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain - Silvia Micheletti.- 7. "These Pale Alchemies": Lucretia Borgia in Nineteenth-Century Literature - Martina Mittag.- 8. Magic Matters: On Sexed Bodies and Early Film - Kathrin Peters.- 9. Fun and Games: The Joy of Poisoning in Children's Literature - Sylvia A. Pamboukian.- 10. Nuclear Power Subjects: Superheroes and Energetic Film - André Wendler.-11. Visualizing the Invisible: From Substance to Phantasm. Poison Motifs in Narrative Cinema Heike Klippel.- 12. Cinema and the Motif of Poison as Intermingling - Anke Zechner.- 13. Serial Poisoning: Actualizations of the "Yellow Peril" in 1960s Fu Manchu Films - Maja Figge.- 14. Poison Ivy, Lux Interior, Cramps: Cinema as Ontoxicological "Mit-Gift" (Being-With Not as a Given) - Drehli Robnik.- 15. Queering Autoimmunity with Sexual Difference: On Todd Haynes' Poison (1991) and Safe (1997) - Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky.- 16. Conclusion: Identity, Precariousness, and Poison: A Brief and Political Outlook - Heiko Stoff.