The Grotesque Modernist Body

Gothic Horror and Carnival Satire in Art and Writing
2024
ISBN: 978-3-031-54345-6
Verlag: Springer Nature Switzerland

Buch, Englisch, 262 Seiten, Format (B × H): 153 mm x 216 mm, Gewicht: 473 g

Reihe: Palgrave Gothic

explores how and why modernist authors drew on the traditions of the grotesque body in order to represent modern reality accurately. The author employs the concept of the grotesque body as a theoretical framework with which to examine rigorously a range of modernist novels, poems and visual media by Conrad, Lewis, Eliot and Barnes, alongside their historical contexts and theories of humour and horror. This monograph challenges the prevailing narrative of modernism’s abstract, psychological and impersonal ‘inward turn’ by tracing its mechanical-animal hybrid bodies back to

the medieval carnival satire of Rabelais, the gothic horror of the long nineteenth century, from Hoffmann, Shelley and Poe, to H.G. Wells and Henry James, and the uncanny, dreamlike art of Goya and Rousseau.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cruickshank, David

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Gattungen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: A Grotesque Modern Moment.- Chapter One: Joseph Conrad: Bodily Authority.- Chapter Two: Wyndham Lewis: Reading Below the Skin.- Chapter Three: T.S. Eliot: The City as Poet.- Chapter Four: Djuna Barnes: The Female Abject of Desire.- Conclusion: The Modern Grotesque Body.

Über Autor(innen)

Dr. David Alexander Johnson Cruickshank is an independent scholar who received his PhD from King’s College London in 2020, following an Oxford MSt and a BA at Queen Mary. His research promotes modernist bodies as a way to understand how colonial capitalism exploits our personal identity, converting socio-economic forces into horrible transformations of human into object, both for modernists then, and for our own modern moment.