Monsters Today: Investigating the Legendary Other

Legendary monsters are alive and well in the modern world.They are not relics of the ancient past, nor do they belong solely in the domain of fiction, fantasy, and entertainment.They endure through community, emerge through new media, attach to local landscapes, and adapt to contemporary anxieties, a persistence fully in keeping with folkloristics' long emphasis on tradition as process and performance (Ben-Amos 1971;Bauman 1975;Abrahams 1968).Rather than disappearing, legendary monsters have become more elusive, harder to categorize, and more deeply embedded in the cultural systems that produce and sustain them.In North American Monsters: A Contemporary Legend Casebook, I argued that, through the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, legendary monsters remained significant and viable targets for folkloristic analysis (Puglia 2022).That collection sought to prove that legendary monsters were not artifacts of antiquity, but rather an important subgenre of contemporary legend, one sustained through belief, experience, and narrative exchange (Bennett 1987;Ellis 2003; Hufford 1995;Oring 1990).The purpose of the present special issue is not to revisit that claim but to set out from it.Instead of attempting to prove that legendary monsters were and continue to be worthy quarry for folkloristic study in the twenty-first century, this collection asks what their presence reveals about the current state and future directions of legendary monster scholarship and its import for the future of contemporary legend study.This special issue, then, is best understood as a scholarly safari.Rather than a casebook that looks back historically in an attempt to grasp a diffuse scholarly lineage of legendary monster scholarship within contemporary legend studies, this collection explores the present and the future to see how those diffuse strands continue, converge, and develop in the modern day.It