Palgrave Gothic

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.

Staging the Ghost Story is the first book to offer a critical appraisal of the centuries-long relationship between the ghost story and the English stage. The book balances a critical consideration of the ghost story in performance, its history, its cultural politics, and its generic conventions, with practical insight regarding the valency of live representations of the supernatural, the challenges of embodiment, and the power of storytelling. Throughout, it draws upon accompanying interviews with prominent directors, playwrights, performers and stage designers in the industry, including Mark Gatiss, Robin Herford, Michael Holt, Danny Robins, Robert Lloyd Parry, Rebecca Vaughan, Tajinder Singh Hayer, Glen Neath, Adam Z. Robinson, Richard Sutton, Paul Voodini, and Jonathan Goodwin. With a focus upon the seminal elements of theatrical performance: time, space, bodies, devices, and audience, the book invites the elusive shadows of the ghost story to take centre stage.