The Grotesque provides an invaluable and accessible guide to the use (and abuse) of this complex ... more The Grotesque provides an invaluable and accessible guide to the use (and abuse) of this complex literary term. Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund explore the influence of the grotesque on cultural forms throughout history, with particular focus on its representation in literature, visual art and film.
The book:
* presents a history of the literary grotesque from Classical writing to present
* examines theoretical debates around the term in their historical and cultural contexts
* introduces readers to key writers and artists of the grotesque, from Aristophanes and Homer to Rabelais, Shakespeare, Carson McCullers and David Cronenberg
* analyses key terms such as disharmony, deformed and distorted bodies, misfits and freaks
* explores the grotesque in relation to queer theory, post-colonialism and the absurd.
The Grotesque presents readers with an original and distinctive overview of this vital genre and is an essential guide for students of literature, art history and film studies.
Mobility at Large explores a unique trajectory of travel writing. Instead of focussing on best-se... more Mobility at Large explores a unique trajectory of travel writing. Instead of focussing on best-selling travel texts by Paul Theroux, Bill Bryson, Michael Palin, Alain de Botton and others, this book examines a strand of innovative contemporary travel writing wherein the authors experiment with form, content and the politics of representation. In this, innovative travel texts by a range of writers – from Michael Ondaatje and Caryl Phillips to Daphne Marlatt and Sam Miller – transform the genre by inscribing travel, migration, mobility and displacement within a variety of experimental textual strategies to work through questions of movement and the politics of personal identity in relation to the complex interlocutions of space, place and subjectivity. As a result, Mobility at Large challenges those critics who dismiss the genre as inherently conservative and inextricably bound up in a colonial, Eurocentric tradition. The book also documents a long and rich tradition of travel writing that existed well beyond the influence of Europe.
Postcolonial Travel Writing challenges prevailing notions of travel writing as intrinsically colo... more Postcolonial Travel Writing challenges prevailing notions of travel writing as intrinsically colonial and Eurocentric, exploring the works of writers including Jamaica Kincaid, Caryl Phillips, V. S. Naipaul, Pico Iyer and Jan Morris as rich and fascinating examples of the genre. Featuring original interviews with William Dalrymple and Pankaj Mishra, this exciting collection by internationally recognized scholars in the field offers a comprehensive study of postcolonial travel writing, from literature and memoir to essays and travel histories. The volume stands as an innovative benchmark study of future inquiries into the field, and will spark a much-needed rethinking of this vibrant and volatile genre.
"This collection of essays aims to question the notion of authenticity in an
interdisciplinary s... more "This collection of essays aims to question the notion of authenticity in an
interdisciplinary setting, partly to examine it as an abstract concept, partly to
display specific examples of the search for the authentic in its seemingly infinite
guises. With participants from a wide array of disciplines including literary studies, politics,
history, sociology, philosophy, media studies, arts, architecture and musicology, the book stresses the need for a common forum
in which it is possible to debate notions of authenticity across the
disciplines."
Looking at a handful of critical studies of travel writing, one will notice a recurrent feature o... more Looking at a handful of critical studies of travel writing, one will notice a recurrent feature of what is generally termed ‘modern’ travel writing. As always, exactly what constitutes the term ‘modern’ is contested as is the period of time it is supposed to cover. One fact, though, seems to be a commonly acknowledged characteristic of the genre. Namely that, as Ali Behdad’s put it in the title of Belated Travellers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (1994), the modern traveller, and hence the modern travel writer, is characterised by a sense of ‘belatedness’. In the words of James Duncan and Derek Gregory’s Writes of Passage: reading travel writing (1999), ‘the networks that made escape from home possible - railways and steamships, hotels and tour companies - ensured that modern tourism was constantly haunted by the spectre of belatedness, by the sense of arriving at the very moment that a non-modern world was fast disappearing under the impress of modernity’.As Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan argued it in their seminal study Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (1998), the ‘spectre of belatedness’, doggedly tagging the modern traveller as a constant reminder that it is too late, is as a result ‘one of the staples of modern travel writing’.
Mobility at Large explores a unique trajectory of travel writing. Instead of focussing on best-se... more Mobility at Large explores a unique trajectory of travel writing. Instead of focussing on best-selling travel texts by Paul Theroux, Bill Bryson, Michael Palin, Alain de Botton and others, this book examines a strand of innovative contemporary travel writing wherein the authors experiment with form, content and the politics of representation. In this, innovative travel texts by a range of writers from Michael Ondaatje and Caryl Phillips to Daphne Marlatt and Sam Miller transform the genre by inscribing travel, migration, mobility and displacement within a variety of experimental textual strategies to work through questions of movement and the politics of personal identity in relation to the complex interlocutions of space, place and subjectivity. As a result, Mobility at Large challenges those critics who dismiss the genre as inherently conservative and inextricably bound up in a colonial, Eurocentric tradition. The book also documents a long and rich tradition of travel writing...
The article examines two ways of approaching the desert: that of the body and of walking, and tha... more The article examines two ways of approaching the desert: that of the body and of walking, and that of speed and the machine. What is so fascinating about the desert is its draw to extremists of both parties, with the desert representing on one hand the perfect site of ascetic pilgrimage and bodily immersion, yet at the same time the ultimate in abstract machinic abandon. Via an assessment of readings of two different machinic modes of locomotion, as exemplified by the British desert motorist Ralph Bagnold and the French aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the article attempts to plot why the desert attracts such seemingly opposed views.
Sophistication and the grotesque may not at first sight seem to have much in common. Yet as the n... more Sophistication and the grotesque may not at first sight seem to have much in common. Yet as the notions of camp, decadence and extravagance suggest, there are instances in which the grotesque intersects with sophistication and vice versa. In an investigation of sophisticated/grotesque phenomena like the exquisiteness of culinary disgust and the attractive revulsion inspired by freakish bodies, this article probes the outer limits of the restrained excess brought on by the paradox that is the sophisticated grotesque. In particular, the sensation of 'restrained excess' is queried, as exhibited by texts like Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Joris-Karl Huysmans' novel Against Nature and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. The article also examines Bernard Pomerance's drama The Elephant Man and David Lynch's cinematic dramatization of the same name. In this, the article ultimately questions what the grotesquely sophisticated can tell us about the transgressions of norms at either end of the scale of the refined and the vulgar.
Travel writing critics have proclaimed the end of travel since at least the beginning of the 20th... more Travel writing critics have proclaimed the end of travel since at least the beginning of the 20th Century. Yet the global age of the 21st century presents us with a range a problems that challenge the notion of travel in manners that neither travellers, travel writers, nor travel writing critics could have imagined just a century ago. Globalisation and increased mobility, whether it is that of the privileged few who can travel on holiday on jet airplanes, or that of the immigrant labourer seeking employment by crossing borders on foot, have meant millions (if not indeed billions) are constantly on the move. Similarly, an increase in communication technologies and digital media has made the availability of the exotic and the faraway increasingly accessible, to the degree that such terms have been hollowed out almost entirely. Last but not least, we seem now to be living in what has been called the Anthropocene-which is to say an age in which nowhere, not the furthest reachest of the stratosphere nor the lowest point in the marine abyss, are untouched by the activities and detritus of humankind. The essay will give a short overview of the manner in which the notion of 'travel' has been contested by a rapid increase in the mobility of people, goods and information, but primarily examine the impact of the Anthropocene on the notion of travel. For in a world in which the peak of Mount Everest is littered with toilet paper and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is potentially twice the size of the US, where do we locate travel? Specifically, the essay will examine the polar region as an indicator region of the impact of the Anthropocene by looking at a range of early 20th Century arctic travel writing texts and hold them in comparison to late 20th and early 21st Century versions.
The Grotesque provides an invaluable and accessible guide to the use (and abuse) of this complex ... more The Grotesque provides an invaluable and accessible guide to the use (and abuse) of this complex literary term. Justin D. Edwards and Rune Graulund explore the influence of the grotesque on cultural forms throughout history, with particular focus on its representation in literature, visual art and film.
The book:
* presents a history of the literary grotesque from Classical writing to present
* examines theoretical debates around the term in their historical and cultural contexts
* introduces readers to key writers and artists of the grotesque, from Aristophanes and Homer to Rabelais, Shakespeare, Carson McCullers and David Cronenberg
* analyses key terms such as disharmony, deformed and distorted bodies, misfits and freaks
* explores the grotesque in relation to queer theory, post-colonialism and the absurd.
The Grotesque presents readers with an original and distinctive overview of this vital genre and is an essential guide for students of literature, art history and film studies.
Mobility at Large explores a unique trajectory of travel writing. Instead of focussing on best-se... more Mobility at Large explores a unique trajectory of travel writing. Instead of focussing on best-selling travel texts by Paul Theroux, Bill Bryson, Michael Palin, Alain de Botton and others, this book examines a strand of innovative contemporary travel writing wherein the authors experiment with form, content and the politics of representation. In this, innovative travel texts by a range of writers – from Michael Ondaatje and Caryl Phillips to Daphne Marlatt and Sam Miller – transform the genre by inscribing travel, migration, mobility and displacement within a variety of experimental textual strategies to work through questions of movement and the politics of personal identity in relation to the complex interlocutions of space, place and subjectivity. As a result, Mobility at Large challenges those critics who dismiss the genre as inherently conservative and inextricably bound up in a colonial, Eurocentric tradition. The book also documents a long and rich tradition of travel writing that existed well beyond the influence of Europe.
Postcolonial Travel Writing challenges prevailing notions of travel writing as intrinsically colo... more Postcolonial Travel Writing challenges prevailing notions of travel writing as intrinsically colonial and Eurocentric, exploring the works of writers including Jamaica Kincaid, Caryl Phillips, V. S. Naipaul, Pico Iyer and Jan Morris as rich and fascinating examples of the genre. Featuring original interviews with William Dalrymple and Pankaj Mishra, this exciting collection by internationally recognized scholars in the field offers a comprehensive study of postcolonial travel writing, from literature and memoir to essays and travel histories. The volume stands as an innovative benchmark study of future inquiries into the field, and will spark a much-needed rethinking of this vibrant and volatile genre.
"This collection of essays aims to question the notion of authenticity in an
interdisciplinary s... more "This collection of essays aims to question the notion of authenticity in an
interdisciplinary setting, partly to examine it as an abstract concept, partly to
display specific examples of the search for the authentic in its seemingly infinite
guises. With participants from a wide array of disciplines including literary studies, politics,
history, sociology, philosophy, media studies, arts, architecture and musicology, the book stresses the need for a common forum
in which it is possible to debate notions of authenticity across the
disciplines."
Looking at a handful of critical studies of travel writing, one will notice a recurrent feature o... more Looking at a handful of critical studies of travel writing, one will notice a recurrent feature of what is generally termed ‘modern’ travel writing. As always, exactly what constitutes the term ‘modern’ is contested as is the period of time it is supposed to cover. One fact, though, seems to be a commonly acknowledged characteristic of the genre. Namely that, as Ali Behdad’s put it in the title of Belated Travellers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (1994), the modern traveller, and hence the modern travel writer, is characterised by a sense of ‘belatedness’. In the words of James Duncan and Derek Gregory’s Writes of Passage: reading travel writing (1999), ‘the networks that made escape from home possible - railways and steamships, hotels and tour companies - ensured that modern tourism was constantly haunted by the spectre of belatedness, by the sense of arriving at the very moment that a non-modern world was fast disappearing under the impress of modernity’.As Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan argued it in their seminal study Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (1998), the ‘spectre of belatedness’, doggedly tagging the modern traveller as a constant reminder that it is too late, is as a result ‘one of the staples of modern travel writing’.
Mobility at Large explores a unique trajectory of travel writing. Instead of focussing on best-se... more Mobility at Large explores a unique trajectory of travel writing. Instead of focussing on best-selling travel texts by Paul Theroux, Bill Bryson, Michael Palin, Alain de Botton and others, this book examines a strand of innovative contemporary travel writing wherein the authors experiment with form, content and the politics of representation. In this, innovative travel texts by a range of writers from Michael Ondaatje and Caryl Phillips to Daphne Marlatt and Sam Miller transform the genre by inscribing travel, migration, mobility and displacement within a variety of experimental textual strategies to work through questions of movement and the politics of personal identity in relation to the complex interlocutions of space, place and subjectivity. As a result, Mobility at Large challenges those critics who dismiss the genre as inherently conservative and inextricably bound up in a colonial, Eurocentric tradition. The book also documents a long and rich tradition of travel writing...
The article examines two ways of approaching the desert: that of the body and of walking, and tha... more The article examines two ways of approaching the desert: that of the body and of walking, and that of speed and the machine. What is so fascinating about the desert is its draw to extremists of both parties, with the desert representing on one hand the perfect site of ascetic pilgrimage and bodily immersion, yet at the same time the ultimate in abstract machinic abandon. Via an assessment of readings of two different machinic modes of locomotion, as exemplified by the British desert motorist Ralph Bagnold and the French aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the article attempts to plot why the desert attracts such seemingly opposed views.
Sophistication and the grotesque may not at first sight seem to have much in common. Yet as the n... more Sophistication and the grotesque may not at first sight seem to have much in common. Yet as the notions of camp, decadence and extravagance suggest, there are instances in which the grotesque intersects with sophistication and vice versa. In an investigation of sophisticated/grotesque phenomena like the exquisiteness of culinary disgust and the attractive revulsion inspired by freakish bodies, this article probes the outer limits of the restrained excess brought on by the paradox that is the sophisticated grotesque. In particular, the sensation of 'restrained excess' is queried, as exhibited by texts like Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Joris-Karl Huysmans' novel Against Nature and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. The article also examines Bernard Pomerance's drama The Elephant Man and David Lynch's cinematic dramatization of the same name. In this, the article ultimately questions what the grotesquely sophisticated can tell us about the transgressions of norms at either end of the scale of the refined and the vulgar.
Travel writing critics have proclaimed the end of travel since at least the beginning of the 20th... more Travel writing critics have proclaimed the end of travel since at least the beginning of the 20th Century. Yet the global age of the 21st century presents us with a range a problems that challenge the notion of travel in manners that neither travellers, travel writers, nor travel writing critics could have imagined just a century ago. Globalisation and increased mobility, whether it is that of the privileged few who can travel on holiday on jet airplanes, or that of the immigrant labourer seeking employment by crossing borders on foot, have meant millions (if not indeed billions) are constantly on the move. Similarly, an increase in communication technologies and digital media has made the availability of the exotic and the faraway increasingly accessible, to the degree that such terms have been hollowed out almost entirely. Last but not least, we seem now to be living in what has been called the Anthropocene-which is to say an age in which nowhere, not the furthest reachest of the stratosphere nor the lowest point in the marine abyss, are untouched by the activities and detritus of humankind. The essay will give a short overview of the manner in which the notion of 'travel' has been contested by a rapid increase in the mobility of people, goods and information, but primarily examine the impact of the Anthropocene on the notion of travel. For in a world in which the peak of Mount Everest is littered with toilet paper and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is potentially twice the size of the US, where do we locate travel? Specifically, the essay will examine the polar region as an indicator region of the impact of the Anthropocene by looking at a range of early 20th Century arctic travel writing texts and hold them in comparison to late 20th and early 21st Century versions.
Zombies are everywhere. Film, television, literature, graphic novels, computer games; all are inu... more Zombies are everywhere. Film, television, literature, graphic novels, computer games; all are inundated by the walking dead. Transplanted from its humble beginnings in Haiti folklore and adapted by Hollywood for the silver screen, the zombie has come a long way since it was first taken out of its local Caribbean/Haitian context. Returning to the zombie’s tropical roots, the paper will examine a particular regional version of the now so geographically diverse and heavily mediated ubiquitous agent of worldwide catastrophic collapse. Inspired by the notion of Global Gothic and departing from studies of Gothic that are limited by specific nations, the paper will explore various visions of ‘the tropical zombie’ as a vehicle for framing disasters historically and generically, regional and globally. Specifically, the paper will examine a range of examples of the Zombie Tropocalypse as evidenced by computer games like Dead Island and Dead Rising III.
Extract from chapter:
In Necroville (1994), British science fiction writer Ian McDonald explor... more Extract from chapter:
In Necroville (1994), British science fiction writer Ian McDonald explores
the future of nanotechnology. As McDonald points out in the epigraph to the
novel (quoted above), experts in the field tend to focus on how nanotechnology
will revolutionise and transform physical matter. Kim Eric Drexler, for
instance, who first popularised the term, predicts that nanotechnology will
bring about a ‘radical abundance’ that will instigate ‘a physical revolution’
(Drexler, Radical 53). Likewise, Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering at
Google and the inventor of many digital technologies, states that ‘nanotechnology
promises the tools to rebuild the physical world’ (226). From these
perspectives, nanotechnology might, as McDonald’s epigraph to Necroville
suggests, turn ‘trash into oil or asteroids into heaps of Volkswagens, or hanging
exact copies of Van Goghs in your living room oil.’ Consequently, nanotechnology
is a technology that focuses on how ‘to make things’ and of being
‘really good at [it]’ (Drexler, Radical 54, 286). Yet in focusing on base matter,
on cheap commodities and free energy, on Volkswagens and Van Goghs,
we could be missing the true potential of nanotechnology. For McDonald,
nanotechnology will change our lives because it will change life itself.
Uploads
Books by Rune Graulund
The book:
* presents a history of the literary grotesque from Classical writing to present
* examines theoretical debates around the term in their historical and cultural contexts
* introduces readers to key writers and artists of the grotesque, from Aristophanes and Homer to Rabelais, Shakespeare, Carson McCullers and David Cronenberg
* analyses key terms such as disharmony, deformed and distorted bodies, misfits and freaks
* explores the grotesque in relation to queer theory, post-colonialism and the absurd.
The Grotesque presents readers with an original and distinctive overview of this vital genre and is an essential guide for students of literature, art history and film studies.
interdisciplinary setting, partly to examine it as an abstract concept, partly to
display specific examples of the search for the authentic in its seemingly infinite
guises. With participants from a wide array of disciplines including literary studies, politics,
history, sociology, philosophy, media studies, arts, architecture and musicology, the book stresses the need for a common forum
in which it is possible to debate notions of authenticity across the
disciplines."
Papers by Rune Graulund
The book:
* presents a history of the literary grotesque from Classical writing to present
* examines theoretical debates around the term in their historical and cultural contexts
* introduces readers to key writers and artists of the grotesque, from Aristophanes and Homer to Rabelais, Shakespeare, Carson McCullers and David Cronenberg
* analyses key terms such as disharmony, deformed and distorted bodies, misfits and freaks
* explores the grotesque in relation to queer theory, post-colonialism and the absurd.
The Grotesque presents readers with an original and distinctive overview of this vital genre and is an essential guide for students of literature, art history and film studies.
interdisciplinary setting, partly to examine it as an abstract concept, partly to
display specific examples of the search for the authentic in its seemingly infinite
guises. With participants from a wide array of disciplines including literary studies, politics,
history, sociology, philosophy, media studies, arts, architecture and musicology, the book stresses the need for a common forum
in which it is possible to debate notions of authenticity across the
disciplines."
In Necroville (1994), British science fiction writer Ian McDonald explores
the future of nanotechnology. As McDonald points out in the epigraph to the
novel (quoted above), experts in the field tend to focus on how nanotechnology
will revolutionise and transform physical matter. Kim Eric Drexler, for
instance, who first popularised the term, predicts that nanotechnology will
bring about a ‘radical abundance’ that will instigate ‘a physical revolution’
(Drexler, Radical 53). Likewise, Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering at
Google and the inventor of many digital technologies, states that ‘nanotechnology
promises the tools to rebuild the physical world’ (226). From these
perspectives, nanotechnology might, as McDonald’s epigraph to Necroville
suggests, turn ‘trash into oil or asteroids into heaps of Volkswagens, or hanging
exact copies of Van Goghs in your living room oil.’ Consequently, nanotechnology
is a technology that focuses on how ‘to make things’ and of being
‘really good at [it]’ (Drexler, Radical 54, 286). Yet in focusing on base matter,
on cheap commodities and free energy, on Volkswagens and Van Goghs,
we could be missing the true potential of nanotechnology. For McDonald,
nanotechnology will change our lives because it will change life itself.