Fiction Of The Modern Grotesque

This exuberantly spooky novel, in which horror, repressed eroticism, and sulfurous social comedy intertwine like the vines in an overgrown English garden, is now a major motion picture, starring Alan Bates, Sting, and Theresa Russell.

In Bluebeard's Castle (1911), The Wooden Prince (1916/17), The Miraculous Mandarin (1919/24, rev. 1931) and Cantata Profana (1930), Bartók engaged scenarios featuring either overtly grotesque bodies or closely related transformations and violations of the body. In this book, Julie Brown argues that Bartók's concerns with stylistic hybridity (high-low, East-West, tonal-atonal-modal), the body, and the grotesque are inter-connected. All three were thoroughly implicated in cultural constructions of the Modern during the period in which Bartók was composing.

Modern American Grotesque by James Goodwin explores meanings of the grotesque in American culture and explains their importance within our literature and photography. What Flannery O'Connor said in the 1950s of American mass media—that the problem for a serious writer of the grotesque is “one of finding something that is not grotesque”—is incalculably truer today. Ask people what they find grotesque in the national scene and many will readily offer examples from tabloid journalism, extreme movie genres, reality shows, celebrity news, YouTube, and the like. As contemporary life is increasingly given over to such surface phenomena, it is an appropriate time to examine the more deeply rooted places of the grotesque as a literary and visual tradition over the last full century. A lineage of the modern grotesque evolved in the fiction of Sherwood Anderson, Nathanael West, and Flannery O'Connor, and the photography of Weegee and Diane Arbus. Each of these artists adopts the grotesque in order to recontextualize American culture and society and thereby to advance an attitude toward our collective history. To understand the deep structure of the grotesque Goodwin's book calls upon contexts that involve visual aesthetics, theories of comedy, prose stylistics, the technology of photography, ideas of reflexivity, and concepts of racial difference.

The Early Modern Grotesque: English Sources and Documents 1500-1700 offers readers a large and fully annotated collection of primary source texts addressing the grotesque in the English Renaissance. The sources are arranged chronologically in 120 numbered items with accompanying explanatory Notes. Each Note provides clarification of difficult terms in the source text, locating it in the context of early modern English and Continental discourses on the grotesque. The Notes also direct readers to further English sources and relevant modern scholarship. This volume includes a detailed introduction surveying the vocabulary, form and meaning of the grotesque from its arrival as a word, concept and aesthetic in 16th century England to its early maturity in the 18th century. The Introduction, Items and Notes, complemented by illustrations and a comprehensive bibliography, provide an unprecedented view of the evolving complexity and diversity of the early modern English grotesque. While giving due credit to Wolfgang Kayser and Mikhail Bakhtin as masters of grotesque theory, this ground-breaking book aims to provoke new, evidence-based approaches to understanding the specifically English grotesque. The textual archive from 1500-1700 is a rich and intriguing record that offers much to interested readers and researchers in the fields of literary studies, theatre studies and art history.

In a collection inspired by the mythologies of Europe, China, and her beloved Aotearoa-New Zealand, four-time Bram Stoker Award®-winner Lee Murray twists and subverts ancient themes, stitching new creatures from blood and bone, hiding them in soft forest mists and dark subterranean prisons. In this volume, construction workers uncover a hidden tunnel, soldiers wander, lost after a skirmish, and a dead girl yearns for company. Featuring eleven uncanny tales of automatons, zombies, golems, and dragons, and including the Taine McKenna adventure “Into the Clouded Sky”, Murray’s Grotesque: Monster Stories breathes new life into the monster genre.