In his original programme, Berlioz called the last two movements a dream – or nightmare. Despairing of the chances of a production of his opera Les Francs-juges, he took from it a ferocious ‘Marche des gardes’ – soldiers who, in the opera, are obedient to a tyrant. The orchestra is enlarged by additional brass (trombones and ophicleide or tuba) and percussion. The main theme is presented in many guises, with much harmonic and instrumental originality. To fit the March into the symphony Berlioz added a recollection of the idée fixe at the end, where the image of the beloved woman is brutally cut off; interrupted as the protagonist dreams of his own execution by guillotine.

Chapter Fourteen explores the relation between poetics and Restoration politics in Germany, France, and Italy. It argues that, similar to earlier aesthetic responses to the failure of the French Revolution, writers sought alternatives to the political and geographic order established at Vienna, imagining works that synthesise the past and the present in order to inspire change. After explaining why the Restoration left Britain largely unscathed, the author looks at examples of literary and political restoration in Novalis, Chateaubriand, Lamenais, and Metternich to show how restoration did not mean a nostalgic return into the past but rather the creation of something new. The chapter then compares the Restoration poetics of Quinet, Hugo and Gautier, suggesting that they advocate the ‘grotesque’ through the recovery of Shakespeare, to imagine a more comprehensive and liberal vision of society than that set forth by Metternich. Balzac’s La comédie humaine serves as a counter-example, ending in a cynicism at odds with the idealism of George Sand. The chapter’s last section compares the political uses of loss, exile, and restoration in two great Italian poets, Foscolo and Leopardi, concluding with a close reading ‘La Sera del dì di festa’ to show how political hope was kept alive.

This chapter argues that Thomas Nashe created a novel role for the urban writer that also assumed an innovative set of aesthetic principles that we associate with the metaphysical and that was directly antagonistic to humanist ideals. The dissatisfaction that Nashe felt at his lack of advancement as a member of the supposed intellectual elite contributed to his deeply skeptical outlook on reality and on the efficacy of humanist writing more specifically. As I newly detail in this chapter, the precise quotidian realities of Nashe’s existence in London in the 1590s pushed him to formulate a novel advocacy of contention even as he pushed away the noisiness of the urban public world, an entirely ambivalent stance towards the city embodied in Nashe’s obsession with corners. In formulating a writing approach that corresponded with his objections to Philip Sidney and Gabriel Harvey and to his urban reality, Nashe innovated his prose style into something less mimetic than affective, a style that foregrounded a speedy aimlessness, as well as a heterogeneous mixture of materialist images. Nashe’s prose thus takes up the very features that we now call the metaphysical.

Is all horror “body horror”? Can we think of the horror genre without thinking about the body’s messy and intimate materiality? This chapter looks at some of the queasier manifestations of horror culture, a mode that foregrounds questions of the body’s (and the reader’s or viewer’s) limits. Despite body horror’s association with recent cinema, this chapter argues for a longer and more diverse lineage for the term, an attention to embodied experience and its grotesque transformations that can be found in US fiction from Charles Brockden Brown’s spontaneous combustions in Wieland (1798) through to the zombie apocalypse novels of the twenty-first century. The emphasis is placed on five main types of body horror and their differences: hybrid corporeality, parasitism, abjection and disgust, the grotesque, and, finally, body horror built around gore and the explicit rendering of violence.

Alison Milbank’s chapter on Gothic prose, ranging from Ann Radcliffe in the late eighteenth century to contemporary Gothic, shows how often language in these works verges on the inexpressible, reminding us that our rational understanding of human experience may only be partial. Language that superanimates the natural world, the frequent use of em dashes that gesture towards the unsaid, even the unsayable, grotesque and arabesque styles, and equivocal, combinatory techniques are all mobilised to create a set of effects that test the limits of our capacity for understanding.

Chapter 2 explores a range of fictional and non-fictional writing on dinosaurs. The first half shows how different writers, including Henry Neville Hutchinson, Grant Allen, and geoscientist Henry Woodward, invoked the comic monsters of Lewis Carroll to develop a new, ‘grotesque’ register for describing dinosaurs. This language naturalised an emergent understanding of dinosaurs, especially American dinosaurs like Triceratops, as having gone extinct owing to the evolution of uselessly monstrous characteristics. These ideas were appealingly absurd to general audiences, who could contrast the progressive traits and intelligence of mammals like themselves with the doomed grotesqueness of the dinosaurs. The chapter’s second half examines this new way of talking about dinosaurs, providing close readings of humourist Eugene Field’s poem ‘Extinct Monsters’ (1893), Edward Cuming’s Wonders in Monsterland (1901), and Emily Bray’s Old Time and the Boy (1921). In addition to depicting dinosaurs through Carrollian nonsense conventions, all three of these texts were direct responses to the works of Hutchinson, demonstrating his long-term importance for the popularisation of dinosaurs.

Chapter 6 starts with the understanding of the advent of the Nights as “a major event for all European literature,” a point that Borges and others argue passionately. In order to see the impact of this event we need to differentiate the Romantic craze of William Beckford in his Vathek, Episodes, and “Long Story,” his translators, and also his admirers from others. Beckford was phenomenal in working across at least three cultures along with Arabic: French, English, and Jamaican. His infatuation and reproduction of the Nights is unique, but we have to place it in context of a raging discussion run by many, but especially Schlegel, of the grotesque and Arabesque. His writing and personal penchant to challenge everything presents him as a filiate who belongs to a specific genealogy in the Nights. His approach is different for instance from the Brontës whose writings bear the marks of a contained infatuation. They are the bridge for twentieth-century shifts in reading and response. A “murky sensualism” which Maxime Rodinson associates with “the Western bourgeoisie” prepares for the dialectic of rapprochement, engagement, and detachment that present the twentieth century and after as more experimental but also no less involved in substantiating the Nights in architecture, painting, enactment of medieval travels, and the practice of parody and pastiche in a postmodernist anxiety and search for distinction.

In this chapter we extend our analysis of the lena to the poetry of Tibullus and Ovid, where the narrative focus is not as much on her appearance or her poetic skill. Tibullus concentrates his readers’ attention on the grotesque actions that the poet–lover visualizes the lena performing, while Ovid focuses on her intention to degrade elegiac love itself. Though they do not have the profile of Acanthis, these lenae are grotesque figures integral to the Tibullan and the Ovidian conceptions of elegy. The images of ugly, sinister, and disgusting actions with which they are associated are for the reader scripts of aversion integral to elegy. Tibullus constructs his script in the subtle manner typical of his style, by making effective use of the reader’s literary memory, which, through a dynamic play of inter- and intra-textual allusion, he engages in the creation of his elegiac grotesque. Ovid constructs his more economically and with bold strokes, presenting his lena with powerful grotesque images– nocturnal, and savage, under the canopy of a bleeding sky – that leave no doubt concerning his intent to use her to subvert with horrid imagery the idealizing purport of love elegy itself.

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. My purpose in this study is to explore 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. I undertake to show that the grotesque plays a significant role in the self-definition of the genre in which it is least expected. Grotesque and idealizing imagery constitute the polarities of a dialectic that lies at the core of elegy. Classical scholars have long been interested in the use of grotesque imagery in such genres as comedy, invective, and satire. There is a sophisticated discussion of the grotesque in these areas of classical literature, which are concerned in part with themes of transgression and excess. Grotesque imagery occurs frequently also in elegy, a genre that foregrounds love and beauty.

In Propertius 4.7, Cynthia is conceived as the character who, in her role as the beloved, can infuse a sinister sensation of the grotesque into the very concept of elegiac love, of which she is the source and the protagonist. The poet ventriloquizes her voice, superimposing her role and gender identity on his, in a strategy that enables him to transmit to the realm of his aesthetic choices her grotesque embodiment of elegy, as well as her allegation that, in charging her with infidelity, he was not truthful about her. In this poem, Propertius’ elegiac programme appears to be centrally committed to a grotesque ethos, derisive and destabilizing of the epistemological and aesthetic conventions by which the genre is presumed to be governed. As a result, the conceptual and aesthetic domains of the genre appear deeply marked by uncanny imagery, contradiction, and instability of form. The imaginative world of this elegy requires readers to shift their interpretive base continually, accepting the incongruous realm of beauty pierced by ugliness as the manifestation of a poetic congruity of a higher order. That dialectical form of congruity is the distinctive feature of the Propertian elegiac grotesque.

A prominent function of the rival in the elegiac scenario is to make it possible for the poet–lover to express the negative emotions of jealousy and indignation, creating the narrative conditions for the elegist to contemplate images of violence, ugliness, and obtuseness through the aesthetic prism of the elegiac form. He thereby gives rise to a sense of artistic beauty that incorporates images of ugliness. The rival is an agent of the paradox of ugliness, physical as well as moral, operating at the core of elegy, and hence an agent of the grotesque. In describing the rival, Propertius resorts to the language of animal behaviour, Tibullus to that of derisible obtuseness, and Ovid to the rhetoric of blood and gore to raise questions about the possibility of a stable erotic relationship founded on the intensity of the protagonist’s passion and on the merits of his poetry. In the course of this process, the elegists reveal that elegiac love, conceived as it is in corporeal terms and in the context of a triangle formed by two lovers and one beloved, is necessarily susceptible to the intrusion of ugly, befouling, and degrading images.

In the mythological account inherited by Ovid, Pasiphae went through a psychological transformation in which she was assailed by the grotesque desire to be mated by a bull. She thereby lowered the human character of her sexuality to that of an animal. When Ovid imports her story into the domain of elegy, her degradation runs counter to the genre’s conventional idealization of sexual life. Yet Ovid’s Pasiphae lives out that craving as if propelled by the rhetoric of elegy. She is a queen pursuing a beloved in a georgic landscape, but she behaves like a composite of the elegiac puella and the elegiac lover. Pasiphae thereby brings her grotesque psychology into the imaginative world of elegy, cultivating her dark desire under its mannerisms, until she manages to have sex with the bull. The elegiac echoes of her role in the erotic scenario, the meter in which it is outlined, and the elegiac allusions in its images – these all shift the ground of the reading experience from the mythical horror of aberrant sexuality to the realm of the elegiac grotesque, in which nefarious eroticism and elegiac love conventions are fused, appearing at once monstrous, contemptuous, and ridiculous.

In his diatribe against love in the De Rerum Natura, Lucretius unleashes a powerful grotesque imagination, endowing it with the gravitas of his philosophy, against the type of love that was to furnish the elegists with their basic theme. Writing the Remedia a generation later, Ovid assumes a perspective on elegiac love reminiscent of Lucretius, but whereas Lucretius was writing outside the boundaries of elegy, by chronology as well as choice of genre, Ovid is an elegist and writes from within its conventions. For Ovid, the aesthetic significance of the grotesque is that the elegiac code includes images that simulate foreignness of origin, in that they appear to intrude into the elegiac domain from somewhere beyond its boundary, while expressing ideas that are in fact generated entirely by the same code. Starting with this aesthetic premise and a narrative scenario in which unfulfilled desire figures as an apparently incurable malady, in the Remedia Ovid assumes a therapeutic stance with respect to both the afflicted lover and the elegist, teaching the one how to ‘unlearn’ his behaviour as a lover and the other how to attempt the ultimate permutation of the elegiac scenario, turning its narrative premise upon itself.

The primary purpose of this chapter is to show that, in the philosophical and literary discourse that immediately preceded the development of Roman love elegy, there exists a context conducive to the grotesque figuration of the sublimity of love and lovers. In Roman culture the philosophical discourse was dominated by Lucretius, who developed his views in dialogue with the poetry and natural philosophy of the centuries that preceded him, especially in the expository genres that united poetry and philosophy. The literary discourse is focused on Catullus, whose use of metaphors as instances of material identification shock the reader with the violation of logic and the transgression of nature. In the elegiac libellus Catullus resorts frequently to such violations, extending them to the human body, to social conduct, and to love itself. Indeed, Catullus makes bold use of the grotesque to show that beneath the flimsy surface of elegance, urbanity, and sentiment expected of the poetic discourse on love, there lurks a reality that is both defiled and defiling. By using images and evocations of this reality, Catullus admits into the domain of love poetry thematic materials and language that transgress the expectations of works meant to foreground love and beauty.

Propertius 4.5 is the poet–lover’s vindictive fantasy against the lena, the character who is most inimical to him in the dramatic scenario of love elegy. He expresses his hostility towards her by depicting her as a profoundly grotesque creature, wicked and revolting in every way. Propertius enables the poet–lover to be mercilessly punitive and to use images likely to generate a strong emotional reaction. The images contemplated by the poet–lover in his rage are the same ones contemplated by us, Propertius’ readers, as we move through the text. Being expressions of a rejected lover, such images are likely to generate a sequence of vehement emotions, both within the narrative and in the reading experience, while our gaze and the poet–lover’s both remain fixed on the lena as an embodied source of the dark passions that course through the poem. We would miss the genre’s signature of authenticity if we did not conclude that the grotesque is implicit in and central to the Propertian elegy.

Hannah earned extravagant praise from both fellow writers and critics, who were collectively bedazzled by his prolific and profound universe and his inimitable prose - at once brilliant and bizarre, gorgeous and grotesque. Even Hannah’s greatest fans admit to occasional “disgust” - he never shied away from violence, and its recipients were often women or racial others. It is into this desperate, violent world that Hannah compulsively deposits his Indians as not just inept but decidedly corrupt guides to a redemption that will not come. A pioneer of so-called “Grit Lit,” Hannah’s work rejects romanticism and nostalgia - conceits that typify and bedevil Indigenous and southern cultures simultaneously. There, the Indigenous motif poses not just as guide but at times as lingering fetish, drawing its subjects toward a narrative of fulfillment, albeit one based on hurt and horror rather than transcendence. For his primarily white southern male characters, the lessons of Indigenous conquest become a contemporary parable for the self-defeating desires, vacancies, betrayals, and violence of both southern history and modernity’s insidious bequests.