The Grotesque Modernist Body: Gothic Horror and Carnival Satire in Art and Writing

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 modernism’s 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.

Dr. David Alexander Johnson Cruickshank is an independent scholar who received his PhD from King’s 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.