Six stories, each based on three random words. 1) golf, skin, king When incest persists for many centuries, one of the results is that the chin may protrude and the arrangement of teeth may become chaotic. ... 2) sneakers, harmonica, boast Several days before attending an audition at the world’s best music academy, a destitute boy—who was called a child prodigy—was gifted a pair of white sneakers by his grandmother. ... 3) mail, fried rice, art If you send an electronic mail to the account managed by the devil, a fantastic piece of inspiration comes back in response. This rumor had existed at the Royal Art Academy for quite some time. ... 4) scalp, drum, wallet There is a way to forever honor the resonance of a human soul after its death. ... 5) tap water, scribble, backcountry In the backcountry, where not a single shabby shack stands in the one-hundred-kilometer radius, there are said to live many folks who perform strange art. ... 6) trial, fever, chin Officially, it was called a trial, but in reality, it was more like a Hanging Announcement Ceremony.

This book provides an overview of the literary grotesque in 19th-century Europe, with special emphasis on Charles Dickens, whose use of this complex aesthetic category is thus addressed in relation with other 19th-century European writers. The crossing of geographical boundaries allows an in-depth study of the different modes of the grotesque found in 19th-century fiction. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the reasons behind the extensive use of such a favoured mode of expression. Intertextuality and comparative or cultural analysis are thus used here to shed new light on Dickens’s influences (both given and received), as well as to compare and contrast his use of the grotesque with that of key 19th-century writers like Hugo, Gogol, Thackeray, Hardy and a few others. The essays of this volume examine the various forms taken by the grotesque in 19th-century European fiction, such as, for example, the fusion of the familiar and the uncanny, or of the terrifying and the comic; as well as the figures and narrative techniques best suited for the expression of a novelist’s grotesque vision of the world. These essays contribute to an assessment of the links between the grotesque, the gothic and the fantastic, and, more generally, the genres and aesthetic categories which the 19th-century grotesque fed on, like caricature, the macabre and tragicomedy. They also examine the novelists’ grotesque as contributing to the questioning of society in Victorian Britain and 19th-century Europe, echoing its raging conflicts and the shocks of scientific progress. This study naturally adopts as its theoretical basis the works of key theorists and critics of the grotesque: namely, Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire and John Ruskin in the 19th century, and Mikhail Bakhtin, Wolfgang Kayser, Geoffrey Harpham and Elisheva Rosen in the 20th century.

This work offers a critical biography and analysis of the varied literary output of novels, short stories, screenplays, poetry, articles and essays of the American writer Terry Southern. The book explores Southern's career from his early days in Paris with friends like Samuel Beckett, to swinging London in such company as the Rolling Stones, to filmmaking in Los Angeles and Europe with luminaries like Stanley Kubrick. His writings are examined in chronological order. David Tully was granted unprecedented access by Terry Southern's family to rare, unpublished work from his private archives. This study offers the first comprehensive examination of the career of this major American writer.

“No other book of the Bible is quite so R-rated. No other book is quite so ugly or grotesque. Judges offers its reader not a roster of angelic saints, but an astonishing tempest of brutality, feces, slaughter, assassinations, conspiracy, genocide, child sacrifice, rage, betrayal, mass graves, gang-rape, corpse mutilation, kidnapping, and civil war.” Gift of the Grotesque offers readers a series of seven theological essays focused on one of the most confusing and challenging books in the biblical canon. Stulac’s captivating style combines sensitive exegesis with broadly accessible meditations on culture, art, music, literature, memoir, theology, and spirituality. Better understood as a companion rather than a biblical commentary, this unusual resource will kickstart the theological imagination of anyone who struggles to understand how the book of Judges points forward to the life and work of Jesus Christ. Dare to follow an experienced biblical scholar into the heart of Israel’s theological Dark Age, and you will encounter there the transformative Word of God in ways you do not expect. The prophetic book of Judges, writes Stulac, “wants to gut you like a fish, because on the far side of that unenviable prospect, it wants you alive like you’ve never lived before.”

The authors focus on the religious and theological significance of grotesque imagery in art and literature, exploring the religious meaning of the grotesque and its importance as a subject for theological inquiry.

God and the Gothic: Romance and Reality in the English Literary Tradition provides a complete reimagining of the Gothic literary canon to examine its engagement with theological ideas, tracing its origins to the apocalyptic critique of the Reformation female martyrs, and to the Dissolution of the monasteries, now seen as usurping authorities. A double gesture of repudiation and regret is evident in the consequent search for political, aesthetic, and religious mediation, which characterizes the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution and Whig Providential discourse. Part one interprets eighteenth-century Gothic novels in terms of this Whig debate about the true heir, culminating in Ann Radcliffe's melancholic theology which uses distance and loss to enable a new mediation. Part two traces the origins of the doppelgänger in Calvinist anthropology and establishes that its employment by a range of Scottish writers offers a productive mode of subjectivity, necessary in a culture equally concerned with historical continuity. In part three, Irish Gothic is shown to be seeking ways to mediate between Catholic and Protestant identities through models of sacrifice and ecumenism, while in part four nineteenth-century Gothic is read as increasingly theological, responding to materialism by a project of re-enchantment. Ghost story writers assert the metaphysical priority of the supernatural to establish the material world. Arthur Machen and other Order of the Golden Dawn members explore the double and other Gothic tropes as modes of mystical ascent, while raising the physical to the spiritual through magical control, and the M. R. James circle restore the sacramental and psychical efficacy of objects.

Charles Baudelaire is usually read as a paradigmatically modern poet, whose work ushered in a new era of French literature. But the common emphasis on his use of new forms and styles overlooks the complex role of the past in his work. In Grotesque Figures, Virginia E. Swain explores how the specter of the eighteenth century made itself felt in Baudelaire's modern poetry in the pervasive textual and figural presence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Not only do Rousseau's ideas inform Baudelaire's theory of the grotesque, but Rousseau makes numerous appearances in Baudelaire's poetry as a caricature or type representing the hold of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution over Baudelaire and his contemporaries. As a character in "Le Poème du hashisch" and the Petits Poèmes en prose, "Rousseau" gives the grotesque a human form. Swain's literary, cultural, and historical analysis deepens our understanding of Baudelaire and of nineteenth-century aesthetics by relating Baudelaire's poetic theory and practice to Enlightenment debates about allegory and the grotesque in the arts. Offering a novel reading of Baudelaire's ambivalent engagement with the eighteenth-century, Grotesque Figures examines nineteenth-century ideological debates over French identity, Rousseau's political and artistic legacy, the aesthetic and political significance of the rococo, and the presence of the grotesque in the modern.

The American Stage and the Great Depression: A Cultural History of the Grotesque proposes a correlation between the divided "mind" of America during the depression and popular stage works of the era. Theatre works such as Jack Kirkland's comic-horrific adaptation of Tobacco Road, Olsen and Johnson's "scream-lined revue", Hellzapoppin, and successful plays by Robert E. Sherwood, Clare Boothe Luce, and S. N. Behrman are interpreted as theatrical reflections of depression culture's sense of being trapped between a discredited past and a nightmarish future. The author analyzes the America of the 1930s as an era of the "grotesque", in which the irreconcilable were forced into tense and dynamic coexistence, and by examining these works of theatre as products of particular historical circumstances, argues for a strong connection between cultural history and theatre history.