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 modernisms 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.
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.
Dr. David Alexander Johnson Cruickshank is an independent scholar who received his PhD from Kings 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.
