A Grotesque Bibliography

Detail from Les Deux Ne Font Qu'un, 1791

[A Work in Progress]

Place of publication is London, unless otherwise stated.

Secondary Works

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Adams, Percy G., Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660-1800 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962).
Altick, Richard D., The Shows of London (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1978).
Antal, Friedrich, Hogarth and his Place in European Art (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962).
The Arcimboldo Effect (Thames and Hudson, 1987).
Ashbee, C.R., Caricature (Chapman & Hall: Universal Art Series, 1928).
Atherton, Herbert M., Political Prints in the Age of Hogarth: A Study of the Ideographic Representation of Politics (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1974).
Atkins, G. Douglas, Reading Deconstruction/ Deconstructive Reading (Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1983).
Babb, Lawrence, "The Cave of Spleen," Review of English Studies 12 (1936), pp. 165-76.
Babcock, Barbara A., The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978).
Babcock, Barbara A., "The Novel and the Carnival World," Modern Language Notes 89 (1974), pp. 911-37.
Bachelard, Gaston, The Psychoanalysis of Fire (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968).
---, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie, trans. with a Preface and Introduction by Collette Gaudin (Texas: Spring Publications, 1987).
Baldick, Chris, In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity and Nineteenth Century Writing (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1987).
Baltrusaitis, Jurgis, Anamorphic Art, trans. W.J. Strachen, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
Banta, M., and C. Hinsley, From Site to Sight (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986).
Barasch, Frances K., The Grotesque: A Study in Meanings (The Hague: Mouton, 1971).
Barber, C.L., Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1959).
Barolsky, Paul, Infinite Jest: Wit and Humour in Italian Renaissance Art (The University of Missouri Press, 1978).
Barrow, Mark V., "A Brief History of Teratology," in Problems of Birth Defects, ed. T. V. Persaud (Baltimore, University Park Press, 1977), 18-28.
Beaumont, Cyril, The History of Harlequin, (New York: B. Blom, 1967).
Bell, Ian A., Literature and Crime in Augustan England (Routledge, 1991).
Bellamy, Liz, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992).
Berlin, Brent, "Speculations on the growth of ethnobotanical nomenclature", Language and Society 1 (1972), pp. 51-86.
Bogdan, Robert, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
Boehn, Max Von, Puppets and Automata, trans. Josephine Nicoll, (New York: Dover, 1972).
Bosmajian, Hamida, "The Nature and Function of the Grotesque Image in Eighteenth Century English Literature," (Unpub. Ph.D thesis, University of Connecticut, 1968).
Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge University Press, 1977).
Bowie, Malcolm, Lacan (Fontana Modern Masters, 1991).
Boyne, Roy, Foucault and Derrida: The Other Side of Reason (Unwin Hyman, 1990).
Broberg, Gunnar, "The Broken Circle" in The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century ed. Tore Frangsmyr, J. L. Heilbron, and Robin E. Rider (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 45-71.
Bray, Alan, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, (Gay Men's Press, 1982).
Brooks-Davies, Douglas, Pope's Dunciad and the Queen of the Night (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985)
---, The Mercurial Monarch: Magical Politics from Spenser to Pope (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983).
Brower, Reuben A., Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford, 1959).
Byrd, Max, "Pope and Metamorphosis: Three Notes." Modern Philology 85 (1988), pp. 447-59.
Caillois, Roger, Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1958; 1961).
Campbell, Mary Bane, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400-600 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988).
Carroll, William C., The Metamorphoses of Shakespearian Comedy (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1985).
---, Visits to Bedlam: Madness and Literature in the Eighteenth Century (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1974).
Castle, Terry, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth Century Culture and Fiction (Methuen, 1986).
Caygill, Howard, The Art of Judgement (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
Chesley, Brent Douglas, The Faces of Harlequin in Eighteenth Century English Pantomime, (Unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of Notre Dame, 1986).
Cirillo, A.R., "The Fair Hermaphrodite: Love Union in the poetry of Donne and Spenser," Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 9 (1969), pp. 81-95.
Clifford, Gay, The Transformation of Allegory (Roultedge and Kegan Paul, 1974).
Clayborough, Arthur, The Grotesque in English Literature (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965).
Colie, Rosalie L., Paradoxica Epidemica: The Renaissance tradition of Paradox (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1966).
Corliss, William R., Biol Anomalies (Sourcebook Project, 1992).
Davidson, Arnold, I., "The Horror of Monsters," in The Boundaries of Humanity: Humans, Animals, Machines, ed. James J. Sheehan and Morton Sosna (Berkeley: University of California Press).
Debord, G., The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1973).
De Porte, Michael V., Nightmares and Hobby-Horses; Swift Sterne and Augustan ideas of Madness, (San Marino: University of California Press, 1974).
Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference trans. Alan Bass, (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).
---,Margins of Philosophy trans Alan Bass (Brighton: Harvester, 1982).
Dewhurst, Christopher J., and Ronald R. Gordon, The Intersexual Disorders (London: Baillieire Tindall/ Cassell, 1969).
Dix, Robin, "Addison and the Concept of Novelty' as a basic aesthetic Category" British Journal of Aesthetics 26 (1986) pp. 383-9.
Dollimore, Jonathan, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
Dollimore, Jonathan and Alan Sinfield, Radical Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986).
Donley, Carol C. and Sheryl Buckley (eds) The Tyranny of the Normal (Ken State niversity Press, 1996).
Drimmer, Frederick, Very Special People (New York: Amjon, 1983).
Ducornet, Rikki, The Monstrous and the Marvelous (San Francisco: City Lights, 1999).
Dudley, Edward and Maximilian E. Novak, The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972).
Due, O.S., Changing Forms: Studies in the Metamorphoses of Ovid (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1974).
Dunn, John, The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).
Durant, A., A Pictorial History of the American Circus (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1957)
Edwards, Thomas Robert Jr., This Dark Estate (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963).
---,"Pope's Versions of Nature: The Progression from 'Neo-Classical' to Grotesque Poetic Style," (Unpub. Ph.D thesis, Harvard University, 1956).
Elledge, Scott, ed., Eighteenth Century Critical Essays, 2 vols. (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1961).
Elliott, Robert C., The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, and Art (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1960).
Erickson, Robert A., Mother Midnight: Birth, Sex, and Fate in the Eighteenth Century (Defoe, Richardson, Sterne) (New York: AMS Press, 1986),
Fairer, David, Pope's Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).
---, ed., Pope, New Voices (Havester Wheatsheaf, 1990).
Farnham, Willard, The Shakespearian Grotesque (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971).
Feaver, W., and Gould, A., Masters of Caricature (New York: Knopf, 1981).
Fiedler, Leslie, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981).
Fingesten, Peter, "Delimitating the concept of the Grotesque," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42 (1984), pp. 419-26.
Flynn, Carol Houlihan, The Body in Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth Century English Literature and Thought, 1990).
Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things (Les mots et les choses: une archeologie des sciences humaines), trans A. Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1970).
---, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (Folie et deraison: Histoire de la folie a l'age classique), trans. Richard Howard (Tavistock Publications, 1971).
---,The Birth of the Clinic (Naissance de la clinique: un archeologie du regard medical), trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1973).
---,The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981).
---,The History of Sexuality: Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1986).
---,,The History of Sexuality: Volume 3: The Care of the Self (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1990).
Fox, Christopher, Locke and the Scriblerians: Identity and Consciousness in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988).
Frangsmyr, Tore, J. L. Heilbron, and Robin E. Rider, eds., The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990).
Freud, Sigmund, Introductory Lecture on Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974).
Friedman, John Block, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981).
Frye, Northrop, "The Nature of Satire", University of Toronto Quarterly 14 (1944), pp. 75-89.
---,The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957).
Furth, Montgomery, Substance, Form and Psyche: an Aristotelian Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Garland, Robert, The Eye of the Beholder: Deformity and Disability in the Graeco-Roman World (Cornell University Press, 1995).
Gearhart, Suzanne, The Open Boundary of History and Fiction, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984).
George, M. Dorothy, Hogarth to Cruickshank: Social Change in Graphic Satire (Allen Lane, 1967).
---,English Political Caricature: A Study of Opinion and Propaganda, 2 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1959).
George, M. Dorothy and F. G. Stevens, Catalogue of Prints in the British Museum. Division I: Political and Personal Satires, 4 vols. (1870-3).
Glass, B., O. Temkin, W.L Straus, eds., Forerunners of Darwin, 1745-1859 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959).
Glenister, T.W., "Fantasies, Facts and Foetuses: The Interplay of Fantasy and Reason in Teratology," Medical History 8 (1964) 15-30.
Goffman, E., Stigma (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1963).
---, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959).
Goldsmid, Edmund, ed. Un-Natural History, or Myths of Ancient Science, 4 vols (Edinburgh, 1886).
Gombrich, E..H., Norm and Form: Studies in Art of the Renaissance (Oxford: Phaidon, 1985).
---, Meditations upon a Hobby Horse and other Essays on the Theory of Art (Phaidon Press, 1965).
---,Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Phaidon Press, 1960).
---,and F. Kris, Caricature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1940).
Gould, George, M., Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1897).
Gove, Philip B., The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction: A History of its Criticism and a Guide for its Study, with an Annotated Checklist of 215 Imaginary Voyages from 1700 to 1800 (New York: Columbia University Press).
Graham, Peter W. with Fritz H. Oehlschlaeger, Articulating the Elephant Man: Joseph Merrick and His Interpreters (Parallax: Revisions of Culture and Society Series, Johns Hopkins University Presss, 1992).
Gravil, Richard, ed., Swift, Gulliver's Travels: A Casebook (Macmillan, 1974).
Greenblatt, Stephen, "Learning to curse: Aspects of linguistic colonialism in the seventeenth century," in First Images of America, 2 vols, ed. F. Chiappelli, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), vol. 1, pp. 561-80.
Stephen Greenblatt, "Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion," Glyph 8 (1981), pp. 40-61.
Greene, John C., The Death of Adam: Evolution and its Impact on Western Thought (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1959).
Gubar, Susan, "The Female Monster in Augustan Satire," Signs 3 (1977), pp. 380-94.
Guiccardi, Jean-Pierre, "Hermaphrodite et le proletaire," Dix-Huitieme Siecle XII (1980), pp. 49-79.
Gutting, Gary, Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Hagstrum, Jean H., Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
---, Eros and Vision: The Restoration to Romanticism (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1989).
---, "Dryden's Grotesques: An Aspect of the Baroque in his Art and Criticism," in Writers and their Background: John Dryden, ed. Earl Miner (G. Bell and Sons, 1972), pp. 90-119.
Halberstam, Judith, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995).
Halttunen, Karen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study in Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-70 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).
Hammond, Brean, Pope: New Readings (Harvester, 1986).
Hammond, Paul, John Oldham and the Renewal of Classical Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Hansen, William, Phlegon of Tralles’ Book of Marvels (Exeter Studies in History).
Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982).
Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Boston: Little Brown, 1973).
Hervey, David, The Creatures That Time Forgot: Photography and Disability Imagery (New York: Routledge, 1992).
Hirst, B.C., and G. A. Peirson, Human Monstrosities (Philadelphia: Lea Brothers, 1893).
Holden, Lynn, A., Forms of Deformity (Sheffield Academic Press, 1991).
Hjort, Mette, ed. Rules and Conventions (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
Holt, Elizabeth G., A Documentary History of Art, 2 vols. (New York: Garden City: Doubleday 1957-8).
Huizinga, Johan, Homo-Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Proeve eener bepaling van het spelelement der cultur) trans. R.F.C. Hull (Haarlem, 1938; Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949).
Hulme, Peter, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Carribean 1492-1797 (Methuen, 1986).
Hunter, J. Paul, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth Century English Fiction (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1990).
Impey, Oliver and Arthur MacGregor, eds., The Origins of Museums (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985).
Jay, Ricky, Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women (New York, Villard, 1986).
Jefferson, D.W., "Swift and the Tradition of Wit," in The New Pelican Guide to English Literature: 4. From Dryden to Johnson, ed. Boris Ford (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), pp. 195-213.
Jennings, Lee Byron, The Ludicrous Demon (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985).
Jones, Howard W., and William W. Scott, Hermaphrodites, Genital Anomalies and Related Endocrine Disorders (Baltimore; Williams and Wilkins, 1971).
Jones, William Powell, The Rhetoric of Science: A Study of Scientific Ideas and Imagery in Eighteenth Century English Poetry (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).
Josso, Nathalie, ed. The Intersex Child (Basel: S. Karger, 1981).
Jung, Karl, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy (1955-6), trans. R.F.C. Hull (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963)
---, Psychology and Alchemy (1944), trans. R.F.C. Hull (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953).
---, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (1951), trans. R.F.C. Hull (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2nd Ed., 1968).
---, Symbols of Transformation: An Analysis of the Prelude to a Case of Schizophrenia (1952), trans. R.F.C. Hull (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956).
Karp, I., and S. Lavine, Exhibiting Cultures (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Press, 1991).
Kayser, Wolfgang, The Grotesque in art and Literature, trans. Ulrich Weisstein (Bloomington: University of Indiana, 1963).
Kemp, Martin, Leonardo da Vinci: The Mavellous Works of Nature and Man (J.M. Dent, 1981).
Kenny, Shirley Strum, British Theatre and Other Arts 1660-1800 (Washington: Folger, Associated University Press, 1984)
King, James; Lynn, Bernadette, "The Metamorphoses in English eighteenth century mythological handbooks and translations with an exemplum, Pope's The Rape of the Lock." Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 185 (1980), pp. 131-179.
Klingender, Francis Donald, Hogarth and English Caricature (New York: Transatlantic Arts, 1944).
Knight D.M., Ordering the World: A History of Classifying Man (Burnett Books, in association with Andre Deutsch, 1981).
Knight, G. Wilson, The Wheel of Fire (Methuen, 1949).
Korshin, J., Typologies in England 1650-1820 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982).
Kott, Jan, Shakespeare our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski, preface by Peter Brook (Methuen, 1967).
Larson, James, Reason and Experience: the Representation of the Natural Order in the Work of Carl von Linne (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971).
Leitch, Vincent B., Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction (Hutchinson, 1983).
Levine, James M., The Battle of the Books (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).
Lichtenstein, Heinz, "Identity and Sexuality: A Study of their Relationship in Man," JAPA 9 (1961), pp. 189-232.
Lipking, Lawrence, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth- Century England (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1970).
Lynch, Bohun, A History of Caricature (Faber and Gwyer, 1926).
Louis, Frances Deutsch, Swift's Anatomy of Misunderstanding: A Study of Swift's Epistemological Imagination (George Prior, 1981).
Lovejoy, Arthur O., The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1936).
---,Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961).
Maccubbin, Robert Purks, 'Tis Nature's Fault: Unauthorised Sexuality during the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Mack, Maynard, "The Shadowy Cave: Some Speculations on a Twickenham Grotto," in Restoration and Eighteenth Century Literature: Essays in honor of Alan Dugald McKillop, ed. Carroll Camden (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1963), pp. 69-88.
---, The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope 1731-43 (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Buffalo Press, 1969).
Malefijt, Annemarie de Waal, "Homo Monstrosus," Scientific American 219 (1968), pp. 113-18.
Man, Paul de, "The Epistemology of Metaphor," Critical Enquiry 5 (1978), pp. 16-22.
Manley, Lawrence, Convention 1500-1750 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1980).
Mannix, Daniel P. Freaks: We Who Are Not as Others (San Francisco: Re/Search Publications, 1990; Juno Books 1998).
McKeon, Michael, The Origins of the English Novel (London: Century Hutchinson Ltd, Radius Books; Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).
McKeown, Simon, Monstrous Births (Indelible Inc, 1991).
McKennon, J., A Pictorial History of the American Carnival. (Sarasota, Fla.: Carnival Publishers, 1980).
McNamara. Brooks, " ‘A Congress of Wonders’: The Rise and Fall of the Dime Museum," Emerson Society Quarterly 20, no. 3 (1974): 216-32.
McNeil, David, The Grotesque Depiction of War and the Military in Eighteenth Century Fiction (University of Delaware Press, 1990).
Meindl, Dieter, American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque (University of Missouri Press, 1996).
Mitchell, Michael, Monsters of the Gilded Age: The Photographs of Charles Eisenmann (Toronto: Gage, 1979).
Money, John, Sex Errors of the Body: Dilemmas, Education, Counselling (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968).
Morley, Henry, Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair (Chapman and Hall, 1859).
Nicoll, Allardyce, Masks, Mimes and Miracles: Studies in the Popular Theatre (New York, Cooper Square Publishers, 1963).
---,The World of Harlequin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963).
Nicholson M.H., and Rosseau, G.S., This Long Disease my Life: Alexander Pope and the Sciences (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1968).
Niklaus, Thelma, Harlequin Phoenix: or the Rise and Fall of a Bergamask Rogue (Bodley Head, 1956).
Nishimura, Hideo, and James R. Miller Methods for Teratological Studies in Experimental Animals and Man (London: Pitman, 1969).
Nokes, David, Jonathan Swift: A Hypocrite Reversed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Norton, Rictor, Mother Clap's Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England 1700-1830 (The Gay Men's Press, 1992).
Oppenheimer, Paul, Evil and the Demonic: A New Theory of Monstrous Behaviour (New york University Press, 1999).
Park, Katharine and Daston, Lorraine J., "Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century France and England," Past and Present 92 (1981), pp. 20-54.
Parton, J., Caricature and other comic art (London, 1877).
Pollak, Ellen, Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
Paulson, Ronald, Hogarth's Graphic Works (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970).
---, Hogarth: His Life, Art and Times, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970).
---, Emblem and Expression: Meaning in English Art in the Eighteenth Century (Thames and Hudson, 1975).
---, Popular and Polite Art in the Age of Hogarth (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979).
---, Representations of Revolution 1789-1820 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).
---, Breaking and Remaking: Aesthetic Practice in England 1700-1820 (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1989).
---, Hogarth: The Modern Moral Subject 1697-1732, vol 1 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992).
---, Hogarth: High Art and Low 1732-1750, vol. 2 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992).
Praz, Mario, An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration from Pompei to Art Nouveau, trans. William Weaver (Thames and Hudson, 1964).
Purcell, Rosamond Wolff, Special Cases: Natural Anomalies and Historical Monsters (Chronicle Books, 1998).
Quilligan, Maureen, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979).
Randall, Lilian, M.C., Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, Californian Studies in the History of Art, 4, 1966).
Raven, Charles E., John Ray, Naturalist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942).
Rembert, James, A. W., Swift and the Dialectical Tradition, (Macmillan, 1988).
Richetti, John, Philosophical Writing: Locke, Berkeley, Hume (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983).
Rogers, Pat, Literature and Popular Culture in Eighteenth Century England (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1985).
---, Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture (Methuen, 1972).
---, Eighteenth Century Encounters: Studies in Literature and Society in the Age of Walpole (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1985).
Rose, Mark, "Sidney's Womanish Man," Review of English Studies 15 (1964), pp. 353-63.
Roth, H., and R. Cromie, The Little People (New York: Everest House, 1980).
Rothman, David, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little Brown, 1971).
Rousseau, G.S., Tobias Smollet: Essays of Two Decades (Edinburgh: T&T Clark Ltd, 1982).
---, Perilous Enlightenment, 3 vols. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991).
Rousseau, G.S., and Roy Porter, Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987).
Rousseau, G.S., and Roy Porter, The Ferment of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
Sachs, Arieh, The English Grotesque (Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press, 1969).
Sallis, John, Spacing - of Reason and Imagination in texts of Kant, Fichte, Hegel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
Saxon, A. H., P. T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man (New York: New York University Press, 1989).
Sedgwick, Eve, Kosofsky, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990).
Sherbo, Arthur, "Swift and Travel Literature", Modern Language Studies 9 (1979), pp. 114-27.
Seligman, S.A., "Mary Toft - The Rabbit Breeder", Medical History 5 (1961), pp. 349-60.
Seltzer, Mark, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992).
Skulsky, Harold, Metamorphosis: the Mind in Exile (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981).
Slaughter, M.M., Universal Languages and Scientific Taxonomy in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
Sloan, Philip R., "John Locke, John Ray and the Problem of Natural Systems," Journal of the History of Biology 5 (1972), pp. 1-53.
Smith, David W., Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1976).
Snodgrass, Chris, Aubrey Beardsley, Dandy of the Grotesque (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Spacks, Patricia Meyer, The Insistence of Horror: Aspects of the Supernatural in Eighteenth Century Poetry (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1967).
Spingarn, J.E., ed. Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1908; Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1968).
Stafford, Barbara Maria, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1991).
Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Methuen, 1986).
Staves, Susan, "A Few Kind Words for the Fop," Studies in English Literature 22 (1982), pp. 413-28.
Stearn, William T., "John Wilkins, John Ray and Carl Linnaeus," Royal Society of London, Notes and Records 402 (1986), pp. 101-23.
Stevenson, Roger E., Judith G. Hall and Richard M. Goodman (eds), Human Malformation and Related Anomalies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Stewart, Susan, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Ubiversity Press, 1984).
Storey, Robert F., Pierrot: A Critical History of a Mask (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978).
Straub, Kristina, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth Century Players and Sexual Ideology (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982).
Tanner, Tony, "Reason and the Grotesque: Pope's Dunciad," Critical Quarterly 7 (1965), pp. 145-60.
Taylor, Aline Mackenzie, "Sights and Monsters and Gulliver's Voyage to Brobdingnag," Tulane Studies in English 7 (1957), pp. 28-82.
Thomas, Keith, Man and the Natural World (New York: Pantheon, 1983).
Thompson, Charles J. S., The Mystery and Lore of Monsters - with accounts of some Giants, Dwarfs and Prodigies (Williams and Norgate, 1930).
Thompson, E.P., Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975).
Thomson, Philip, The Grotesque (Methuen, The Critical Idiom Series, 1972).
Thomson, Rosemarie Garland, Freakery: Cultural Spectacle of the Extraordinary Body (New York and London: New York University Press, 1996).
Troyer, H.W., Ned Ward of Grubstreet: a Study of Sub-Literary London in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: University of Harvard Press, 1946).
Twitchell, James, B., Carnival Culture: The Trashing of Taste in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
Varey, Simon, Space and the Eighteenth Century English Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Wardroper, John, Kings, Lords and Wicked Libellers: Satire and Protest 1760-1837 (John Murray: History Book Club, 1973).
Warkany, Josef, "Congenital Malformations in the Past," in Problems of Birth Defects, ed. T. V. Persaud (Baltimore, University Park Press, 1977), 5-17.
Wasserman, George, "Carnival in Hudibras," English Literary History 51 (1988), pp. 79-97.
Wagner, Peter, Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America (Grafton, 1990).
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Night of the Living Dead - Shakespeare and Romero

Night of the Living Dead. The power of the Zombie should not be underestimated. Just when you think they’re dead they’re coming back to life again. (Is the guy on the right a Nazi revivalist?)

Here be Monsters. Here be Money. Grotesque horror and gothic fiction sells because it plays to our deep concerns and insecurities. And, to put it crudely, it’s entertaining.

Since the beginning of modern gothic and horror fiction in the eighteenth-century critics have worried about its quality. For each spectator who wants to indulge in the cannibal feast of laughter there is another who wants to uncover the deeper meanings and ideological significance. The two spectators can seldom be reconciled in their different approaches.

It’s no secret that Romero’s film Night of the Living Dead plays well to the fashionable taste for the bizarre. He said that he was catering to a known taste at the time. 

Perhaps an enduring aspect of its appeal was it ability to reflect deeper concerns about the outsider; racism; family relations; cannibalism and taboos; contagion and contamination; the parasitic vampire; the dead weight of the past preying on the present. 

The return of the repressed is another formula, from the psychoanalytic field, that supports the re-incarnation of the living dead theme into the present. 

Let’s admit that film too, as a technology based on spectres and animation, has always been at the forefront of projecting our unconscious onto gigantic screens. What the ego edits out, the Id-film projects back.

Clearly Night of the Living Dead is well suited to a variety of theoretical and ideological approaches. The  notion that the film encapsulates a variety of gothic and grotesque themes which are cross-cultural and recurring across time also helps to explain its continuing appeal to new audiences.

But I often find that there is a resistance to more political interpretations (such as seeing horror films as a replay of grotesque war scenarios displaced onto the home territory – see below). Without speaking about any war in specific terms, the splatter and horror genres zoom in with grotesque effects on human aggression and violence.

With a budget of of $114,000 Romero’s film Night of the Living Dead (NLD) went on to make $40m at the box office in 1961 and has since earned $291m. At first ten members of the production crew stumped up $600 each. It demonstrates admirably what a small group can accomplish where there is a will to succeed.

It’s now a free commons film and rose to be the Internet Archive’s second most downloaded film in 2010, with over 700,000 hits.

Research has show that the film emerged from an  horror comedy co-written by John Russo and George A. Romero, with the catchy title Monster Flick. It is also no secret that the film was inspired by a horror/science fiction novel by Richard Matheson called I Am Legend (1954). The ‘vampiric’ novel dealt with a plague situated in a futuristic Los Angeles. In gothic writing there are few originals.

There is evidence that the dialogue was at times unscripted or improvised and that Duane Jones upgraded Ben Huss’s role in the film to make the character better educated like himself.

The final scene in which the black hero becomes an accidental victim is rather like a KKK lynch mob.

The notion that the film is open to political interpretation will always be open to question. That it is a comment on, or influenced by the war in Vietnam may also seem far-fetched. But I was intrigued to come across some interesting comments from Tom Savini, a special effects artist who worked on later Romero films:

"Some people die with one eye open and one eye half-closed, sometimes people die with smiles on their faces because the jaw is always slack. I incorporated the feeling of the stuff I saw in Vietnam into my work."

Savini worked on films such as Deathdream (1972) “in which a Vietnam MIA  […] shows up alive on his family’s doorstep as a slowly disintegrating zombie-vampire.” (Skal: 308) and it has also been suggested that the film “oddly echoes Sticks and Bones (1972), in which a blinded soldier returns from Vietnam and ‘sees’ for the first time the monstrousness of his own family.” (Skal: 308-9)

The combination of death and humour “smiles on their faces” brings us to the notion that these films are grotesque, rather than pure horror.

Another recurring feature of the monstrous is the inability to kill it off. It keeps coming back.

Another feature of the monstrous and the grotesque is that it typically combines elements of the life-affirming and the life-denying; blindness and insight; the erotic and the dead (eros and thanatos); flowering and decaying; attraction and repulsion; the joke as frivolity and insecurity. 

Is it time, perhaps to celebrate the negotiation of another opposition that plagues us: education and entertainment?

None of that is new, of course, as anyone who has watched Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus or King Lear will know. G. Wilson Knight brilliantly explored Shakespeare characteristic use of grotesque comedy.

To deny the comic components in Shakespeare’s tragedies is to miss the point. Yorick was poor, for instance, but he was also, like Hamlet, a clown. Hamlet is a casebook on humour; from biting satire to practical jokes.

When I contemplate the work of the Bard, I’m thinking The Might of the Living Dead. Or, The Night of the Laughing Dead. 

Do I see a re-make coming on ...

Titus at The Globe London

References 

David J. Skal, (1993/2001) The Monster Show. Faber and Faber.

The Rise of Zombie Studies. Here.