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Thematology --- Grotesque in literature. --- Grotesque in literature

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This seminal book examines the dramatic implications of the grotesque in Romantic aesthetics. There are currently no book-length studies exploring the drama of the Romantic grotesque, a category that accentuates multiplicity and hybridity. The post-Kantian philosophy backing Friedrich Schlegel's Romantic irony provides the most decisive rationalisation of this plurality through theatrical play, and forms the theoretical framework for this study. Poetry and philosophy are merged in Schlegel's attempt to create Romantic modernity out of this self-conscious blurring of inherited perspectives and genres - a mixing and transgressing of past demarcations that simultaneously create the condition of the Romantic grotesque. The other writers examined in this book include A. W. Schlegel, Stendhal, Victor Hugo, and Baudelaire. The primary question is: how is the grotesque used to re-evaluate notions of aesthetic beauty? An answer emerges from a study of those thinkers in Schlegel's tradition who evolve a modern, ironic regard for conventional literary proprieties. Furthermore, how does the grotesque rewrite ideas of poetic subjectivity and expression? Here, Back and Forth foregrounds the enormous importance of Shakespeare as the literary example supporting the new theories. Shakespearean drama, which crosses aesthetic borders, legitimises the grotesque while reflecting the blood and gore of a post-Revolutionary Europe. Consequently, in reviewing hybrid texts like the Schlegelian fragments, Stendhal's Racine et Shakespeare, Hugo's Préface de Cromwell, and Baudelaire's De L'Essence du Rire, this book uses theories of continental Romanticism to reposition the significance of a vitally radical English aesthetic. Through this, Back and Forth claims that the Romantic revisioning of the Shakespearean grotesque helps create the ideas of post-Revolutionary modernity that are crucial to the larger projects of European Romanticism, and the ideas of modernity emerging from them.

Grotesque in literature. --- Literature, Modern --- History and criticism.

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Roman elegy makes frequent use of themes of ugliness and disfigurement, juxtaposing them with images of ideal beauty and sentiment. In order to overcome the obstacles to his erotic relationship, the poet-lover repeatedly represents his rivals and opponents in such a way as to ridicule their appearance and to degrade their social standing. This book explores the theme of corporeal, intellectual, and social degradation from a perspective attentive to the aesthetic significance of the grotesque imagery with which such degradation is accomplished. Although there has been sophisticated discussion of the use of grotesque imagery in genres like comedy, invective, and satire, which are concerned in part with themes of transgression and excess, Mariapia Pietropaolo demonstrates that the grotesque plays a significant role in the self-definition of love elegy, the genre in which it is least expected.

Elegiac poetry, Latin --- History and criticism --- E-books --- Grotesque in literature. --- History and criticism.

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Focusing on the comic genius of Flannery O'Connor, Anthony Di Renzo reveals a dimension of her work that has been overlooked by both her supporters and her detractors, most of whom have concentrated exclusively on her use of theology and parable. Di Renzo compares the bizarre comedy in O'Connor's stories and novels to that of medieval narrative, art, folklore, and drama. Noting an especial kinship between her characters and the grotesqueries that adorn the margins of illuminated manuscripts and the facades of European cathedrals, he argues that O'Connor's Gothicism brings her tales closer in spirit to the English mystery cycles and the leering gargoyles of medieval architecture than to the Gothic fiction of Poe and Hawthorne with which critics have so often linked her work. For Di Renzo the grotesqueness of O'Connor's strange comedy is not a limitation but an accomplishment, deeply rooted in medieval art and satire. O'Connor's peculiar world, he insists, must be accepted on its own terms without consideration of whether it is "ugly." Like the monstrosities carved on the walls at the monastery of Clairvaux, which St. Bernard describes in a famous letter, O'Connor's characters - her rednecks and misfits, her selfish matrons and berserk evangelists - are "deformis formosita ac formosa deformitas," beautifully hideous, hideously beautiful. Relying partly on Mikhail Bakhtin's analysis of Rabelais, Di Renzo examines the different forms of the grotesque in O'Connor's fiction and their parallels in medieval art, literature, and folklore. He begins by demonstrating that the figure of Christ is the ideal behind her satire - an ideal, however, that must be degraded as well as exalted if it is ever to be a living presence in the physical world. Di Renzo goes on to discuss O'Connor's unusual treatment of the human body and its relationship to medieval fabliaux. He depicts the interplay between the saintly and the demonic in her work, illustrating how for her good is just as grotesque as evil because it is still "something under construction." And finally he argues that apocalypse is the culmination of the grotesque in O'Connor's fiction; it is a renewal in destruction, a violent juxtaposition of death and rebirth. For Flannery O'Connor Judgment Day is a cosmic Mardi Gras.

Medievalism --- American literature --- Grotesque in literature. --- Gargoyles in literature. --- History --- European influences. --- O'Connor, Flannery --- Criticism and interpretation.

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Walking Shadows focuses on the American fantastic and the American grotesque, attempting in this manner for the first time to establish an overview of and a theoretical approach to two literary modes that have often been regarded as essential to an understanding of the American cultural canon. The central importance of these two literary forms has been pointed out earlier by important theorists such as Stanley Cavell, David Reynolds, and William Van O’Connor. A number of literary works, from the beginning of the nineteenth to the end of the twentieth centuries, are taken up in order to illustrate the inherent links or family resemblances between the two modes, with special reference to the way in which a Bakhtinian reading may facilitate our appreciation of their status within the canon. These excursions into the House of Fantastic and Grotesque Fiction may be of interest not only to hardcore aficionados, but also to philosophically minded readers in general, in particular perhaps to those who have paid acute attention to debates on late twentieth and early twenty-first century post-structuralism and deconstruction (where the classic positions of Foucault, Derrida, and others still appear to be relevant).

Grotesque in literature. --- Fantasy fiction, American. --- Gothic fiction (Literary genre), American. --- American gothic fiction (Literary genre) --- American fiction --- American fantasy fiction --- Fantastic fiction, American