The Grotesque Modernist Body : Gothic Horror and Carnival Satire in Art and Writing

The Grotesque Modernist Body 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. Acknowledgements Contents List of Figures Chapter 1: A Grotesque Modern Moment Chapter 2: Joseph Conrad The Secret Agent, Anarchy, and the Body The Tradition of the Grotesque: Puppetry and Marionettes in Under Western Eyes Heart of Darkness: Primitive Bodies, Modern Realities Conclusion Chapter 3: Wyndham Lewis Wyndham Lewis’s Grotesque Wild Body Satire and Horror in The Apes of God and Tarr Individuality and Mass-Production: The Revenge for Love and the Grotesque Commodified Body Conclusion Chapter 4: T.S. Eliot Eliot’s “Juvenile” Poems and the Tradition of the Grotesque Body History, Society and Impersonality in Sweeney’s Degenerate Body The Urbanised Patient: Eliot’s Embodiment of the City Conclusion Chapter 5: Djuna Barnes Barnes’s (Un)Natural World: Animals, Plants and Women Barnes, Power and Desire: The Taming of the Female Body Repulsive Words: Censoring/Commodifying the Body Chapter 6: The Modern Grotesque Body Bibliography Index