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Breach of Promise in the Early Nineteenth Century (1800–50): Strategies of Containment, a Created Inconsistency, and the Aesthetic of the Grotesque

Saskia Lettmaier

in Broken Engagements: The Action for Breach of Promise of Marriage and the Feminine Ideal, 1800-1940

This chapter opens with a case study (Orford v. Cole) that presents in detail the way the breach-of-promise action was structured around nineteenth-century notions of ideal womanhood. It provides a ... More

This chapter opens with a case study (Orford v. Cole) that presents in detail the way the breach-of-promise action was structured around nineteenth-century notions of ideal womanhood. It provides a consideration of the strategies practised by plaintiffs and their counsel to obscure the structural inconsistency, and compares these strategies to those practised by other nineteenth-century women similarly positioned on the outskirts of domesticity, on the dangerous interface between the public and the private, so to speak: women writers and women scientists. The chapter finds evidence for the success of these strategies in both the phenomenal awards secured by early-period breach-of-promise plaintiffs and in the fictional records that date from the early period. In the early period, there is no evidence of any fictional exploitation of the structural inconsistency. Rather than exploiting the suit-immanent inconsistency, writers in the early period display a marked tendency to create an inconsistency by inverting the feminine ideal and casting that inversion in the plaintiff role. The artistic effects of this studied ‘miscasting’ – of putting a widow or virago figure where a true woman should be – are both ludicrous and faintly nauseating. In this disharmony, in both the depiction and the reaction it evokes, there is an element of the grotesque, which may be regarded as the dominant aesthetic of early-period breach-of-promise fiction.Less

Conclusion: The Engineered Conscience

Ceri Sullivan

in The Rhetoric of the Conscience in Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan

Each element in the syllogism of the conscience has been tested and found faulty, and each breakdown has been expressed through an alteration in the poet's flesh. Though under Christian theology an ... More

Each element in the syllogism of the conscience has been tested and found faulty, and each breakdown has been expressed through an alteration in the poet's flesh. Though under Christian theology an enquiry into the body is also an enquiry into the godhead that it images, the form mirrored by the poems is not flawless. In Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan, the body is forced into a grotesque shape by the divine pressure to speak. The psychological costs of maintaining a conscience are the aetiolated attitudes of boredom, irony, and opportunistic agreement. They appear in a caricature of a body which is tortured, particulated, involuted, written, on and wrung out. It is thus never wholly the poets' own as it utters someone else's intruded words. Though poems murmur about techniques of control, the devices of grace force disgruntled ejaculations from them. They are more than they mean to say. Such a consciously inadequate use by the poets must shake the position which metaphysical poetry has held for two decades, through Lewalski's scholarly vigour, of being a solely and stoutly Protestant poetics of the Word. Indeed, Stuart writers show that the torques produced by enigma, aposiopesis, subjectio, antanaclasis, and chiasmus engineer the conscience with perhaps a little discomfort in a prosthetic poetics.Less

Entering the Metaverse: Comic Self-Reference

I. A. Ruffell

in Politics and Anti-Realism in Athenian Old Comedy: The Art of the Impossible

This chapter examines the extent, range, and limits of comic self-reflexivity, which has recently been considered under the term ‘metatheatre’. The logical contradictions of such ... More

This chapter examines the extent, range, and limits of comic self-reflexivity, which has recently been considered under the term ‘metatheatre’. The logical contradictions of such self-reference are situated alongside other forms of comic impossibility, and presented not as a form of distancing but as a form of audience involvement and intensification, in a dialogue with other empirical forms of comic impossibility, in which a fictional but grotesque baseline is maintained. Comic self-reference, despite its impossibility, acts as a tether for the audience. Even in less obviously metatheatrical plays (Clouds, Lysistrata, Ecclesiazousai), spikes in comic self-reference are shown to be narrative intensifiers and variations in the extent of self-reference are related to specific, often gendered, ideological demands.Less

Telling Over: The Value of an Audience for Malachi Malagrowther and Chrystal Croftangry

Caroline McCracken-Flesher

in Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow

Revealed as “the Author of Waverley” by his financial crash, Scott reworks his authorial identity, developing new personae even as he admits his authorship. In the Malachi Malagrowther letters, a ... More

Revealed as “the Author of Waverley” by his financial crash, Scott reworks his authorial identity, developing new personae even as he admits his authorship. In the Malachi Malagrowther letters, a persona foregrounding the grotesque body that Scotland has become in an English context, allows him to intervene more deliberately in the economics of politics: he successfully challenges British banking laws as they apply to Scotland. In Chronicles of the Canongate, the persona is a putative author in search of an audience to lend him authority. He learns that relevance depends on his audience's engagement — their disagreement rather than their quiet compliance. Scott constructs an activist relation between writer and reader.Less

Monsters, Marvels, and Transport in Les Travailleurs de la mer

Kathryn M. Grossman

in The Later Novels of Victor Hugo: Variations on the Politics and Poetics of Transcendence

Chapter 2 examines the political and poetic universe of Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866) in the light of La Légende des siècles and William Shakespeare as well as Shakespeare’s The Tempest. ... More

Chapter 2 examines the political and poetic universe of Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866) in the light of La Légende des siècles and William Shakespeare as well as Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Following the spectacular success of Les Misérables, Les Travailleurs de la mer at first seems to head off in a different direction by depicting the mighty battles against nature of a lone hero on an Anglo-Norman reef. What use are his triumphs, if there is no one to notice them—and if they yield no reward in their aftermath? Hugo suggests that creative activity can be a goal unto itself because, as a mode of transport, it transforms everything it touches. Monsters and metaphoricity, the grotesque and the sublime, serve to move the reader into new realms of being. Heroic action, too, can convey the French nation beyond Napoléon III’s twisted regime into a new republican era.Less

Conclusion: “I’ve Been Performing My Whole Life”

Uri McMillan

in Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance

The conclusion serves both as a summation of the book’s arguments and an extension of its recurring trio—objecthood, black performance, and avatar production—into the twenty-first century. Mimicking ... More

The conclusion serves both as a summation of the book’s arguments and an extension of its recurring trio—objecthood, black performance, and avatar production—into the twenty-first century. Mimicking the architecture of the chapters, the conclusion ends Embodied Avatars with yet another unlikely historical pair: pop and hip-hop dynamo Nicki Minaj and sculptor Simone Leigh. It zeroes in on Minaj’s canny manipulation of her voice in her zesty cameo on Kanye West’s single “Monster”; her thrilling scream in that song recalls Heth’s earlier outburst, and the women’s shared wielding of grotesque aesthetics. Building off of Kobena Mercer’s scholarship, the conclusion restages and develops this term through Minaj’s artifice-laced performance in the music video accompaniment to West’s single, a particularly fraught piece that was swiftly banned upon its release. This discussion is followed with a turn to Leigh’s video art opus Breakdown, in which an archetypal black woman (performed by opera singer Alicia Hall-Moran) performs a stunning mental breakdown. The conclusion dissects this artwork’s avatar-play via its skilled execution of failure, its suggestion of the roles diasporic black women perform for the duration of their lives. This provocative pair, bridging high art and popular culture, is enhanced through brief appearances by other contemporary subjects (and their avatars)—including visual and performance artist Narcissister, digital creation Kismet Nuñez, and musician Janelle Monáe.Less

Queer Sexuality and the Lesbian Feminist South

Jaime Harker

in The Lesbian South: Southern Feminists, the Women in Print Movement, and the Queer Literary Canon

This chapter explores the central role of transgressive sexuality in the literary creations of Southern lesbian feminists, both in their embrace of grotesque sexual southernness and their critiques ... More

This chapter explores the central role of transgressive sexuality in the literary creations of Southern lesbian feminists, both in their embrace of grotesque sexual southernness and their critiques of the intersection of sexuality and power. Most Southern feminist writers embraced the Southern grotesque to explore a wide range of hitherto unspeakable sexual practices.Less

Conclusion

DOROTHY YAMAMOTO

in The Boundaries of the Human in Medieval English Literature

This chapter reviews the various ways in which the shared bodiliness of humans and animals has been shown to haunt medieval texts and images. Further avenues for research are suggested, such as the ... More

This chapter reviews the various ways in which the shared bodiliness of humans and animals has been shown to haunt medieval texts and images. Further avenues for research are suggested, such as the role of animal lore and fables in collections of exempla, or the grotesquely blended bodies that people the margins of medieval manuscripts. Lastly, a close reading is offered of some further works in which the human-animal interface is an important thematic element, shaping (and constraining) the kinds of texts that are produced: the romance of William of Palerne, and the various accounts (including that of Gower in Vox Clamantis) of the Rising of 1381.Less

Deep Cuts: Gothic Concepts and Identities

Julia Round

in Gothic for Girls: Misty and British Comics

This chapter examines the presence of Female Gothic concepts and identity positions in Misty. It focuses on the abject, the grotesque and the uncanny and discusses the ways in which these are ... More

This chapter examines the presence of Female Gothic concepts and identity positions in Misty. It focuses on the abject, the grotesque and the uncanny and discusses the ways in which these are informed by transgression and transformation. It argues that Misty’s use of the supernatural often twists these themes into metaphors for the experiences of a female teenage audience: for example through grotesque bodies, uncontrolled growth, and the exclusion of male characters. It demonstrates that the Misty serials in particular are often set in an uncanny atmosphere of mystery and provide a space for uncertainties about family figures and patriarchal authority to be explored. Outcomes are uncertain and the options available to the protagonists frequently comment on the limitations placed on women.Less

Grotesque Bodies: Hybridity and Focalization in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris

Kylee-Anne Hingston

in Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction

This chapter argues that Victor Hugo’s historical Gothic novel Notre-Dame de Paris (1831)—especially in its popular English translation, Hunchback of Notre Dame (1833)—set a precedent in Victorian ... More

This chapter argues that Victor Hugo’s historical Gothic novel Notre-Dame de Paris (1831)—especially in its popular English translation, Hunchback of Notre Dame (1833)—set a precedent in Victorian fiction for investigating the disabled body through narrative form and focalization. The chapter shows how Hugo uses external focalization from a perspective outside the narrative action to portray the disabled body as grotesque and thus inherently deviant but uses strategic internal focalization through characters inside the narrative to destabilize the boundaries between normalcy and abnormality. In particular, focalizing externally on Quasimodo, Hugo separates reader empathy from him and dehumanizes his body; but focalizing through Quasimodo forces readers to share his embodiment, removing the distinction between self and other. Moreover, the chapter contends that the novel’s structural hybridity, which combines disparate genres, enables the dialogic conflict of these two opposing voices and so provides a structural prototype whereby Victorian novels approached disability.Less

Japanese Modern within Modernity

Miriam Silverberg

in Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times

This chapter examines the placing of the consumer-subject within mass culture; erotic grotesque nonsense as montage; Japanese modern culture as politics; and the documentary impulse. It places the ... More

This chapter examines the placing of the consumer-subject within mass culture; erotic grotesque nonsense as montage; Japanese modern culture as politics; and the documentary impulse. It places the years of erotic grotesque nonsense within the global modern culture of the 1920s and 1930s, and positions the Japanese modern culture of those decades within a Japanese modernity stretching from the state-sponsored modernization policies of the Meiji era into the late twentieth century. It also agrees in part with John Frow's distinctions. For Frow, modernism refers to a bundle of cultural practices, some of them adversarial; modernization is an economic process with social and cultural implications; and modernity, overlapping with the modernization process, is a philosophical category designating the temporality of the post-traditional world.Less

The Modern Girl as Militant: (Movement on the Streets)

Miriam Silverberg

in Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times

The Modern Girl makes only a brief appearance in histories of prewar Japan. She is a glittering, decadent, middle-class consumer who, through her clothing, smoking, and drinking, flaunts tradition in ... More

The Modern Girl makes only a brief appearance in histories of prewar Japan. She is a glittering, decadent, middle-class consumer who, through her clothing, smoking, and drinking, flaunts tradition in the urban playgrounds of the late 1920s. Who was this Modern Girl? What made her do what she did? These two questions, raised by the Japanese Modern Girl's contemporaries, are also the two problems posed in this part of the montage of Japanese erotic grotesque nonsense. The Modern Girl was a highly commodified cultural construct crafted by journalists who debated her identity during the tumultuous decade of cultural and social change following the great earthquake of 1923. This chapter deals more with the representation of the Modern Girl as the most predominant Japanese cultural heroine of the era than with the actual beliefs or practices of the young women of that era.Less

‘Our own little grain of truth’

Angela Smith

in Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth von Arnim

‘Our own little grain of truth’ focuses on the interaction of tragedy and comedy, including the gothic grotesque, in Katherine Mansfield’s work in the last three years of her life; it does not offer ... More

‘Our own little grain of truth’ focuses on the interaction of tragedy and comedy, including the gothic grotesque, in Katherine Mansfield’s work in the last three years of her life; it does not offer biographical interpretations of the texts covered. It considers the effect of her reading, suggesting that it provided a trigger for new directions in her writing. Her response to the novel by R. O. Prowse, A Gift of the Dusk, which she reviewed for the Athenaeum and discussed in letters to John Middleton Murry, shows her imagining the dark places of psychology, when traumatic experiences lead characters to confront the unthinkable. Abjection is a motif in all the texts considered: Prowse’s A Gift of the Dusk, Mansfield’s ‘The Stranger’ and ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ and Elizabeth von Arnim’s novel Vera. In each a character confronts what Julia Kristeva describes in Powers of Horror as ‘one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed at a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside’, yet each of these fictions contrives to combine comedy with the dark, tragic dimension.Less

Antecedents to the absurd

Neil Cornwell

in The Absurd in Literature

This chapter focuses on the antecedents to the absurd. It first traces the antecedents of the absurd to the older stages of Greek theatre, and reveals that the absurd can be found in Greek tragedy, ... More

This chapter focuses on the antecedents to the absurd. It first traces the antecedents of the absurd to the older stages of Greek theatre, and reveals that the absurd can be found in Greek tragedy, which returned to the European consciousness during the Italian Renaissance. The chapter then studies absurdity as seen in medieval drama, which featured a dramatised allegory of morality, and the works of Laurence Sterne and Jonathan Swift. It describes Sterne's work as ‘nonsense prose’ and reveals that Swift's ‘gloomy world’ in prose and poetry came from medieval forebears, and even had an affinity with the danse macabre tradition. The final part of the chapter examines the adoption of the ‘Romantic grotesque’ and pre-Surrealist nonsense by several popular authors, including Charles Dickens, Lewis Caroll, Nikolai Gogol and Ugo Foscolo.Less

Introduction

in Ambiguous Bodies: Reading the Grotesque in Japanese Setsuwa Tales

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this book, which is about the grotesque in Japanese setsuwa tales. The book considers the similarities in the roles of creatures, such as animated ... More

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this book, which is about the grotesque in Japanese setsuwa tales. The book considers the similarities in the roles of creatures, such as animated detached body parts, flesh-eating demons, demonic women, and animal spirits, without downplaying the diversity of such representations, and traces the precedents of the grotesque in setsuwa in early Japan, China, and India. It also shows how theories of the grotesque, combined with careful consideration of the cultural, historical, and social contexts of the tales, can enrich our understanding of setsuwa.Less