Grotesque sensibility in literature
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In fiction, a character is usually considered a grotesque if he induces both empathy and disgust. (A character who inspires disgust alone is simply a villain or a monster.) Obvious examples would include the physically deformed and the mentally deficient, but people with cringe-worthy social traits are also included. The reader becomes piqued by the grotesque's positive side, and continues reading to see if the character can conquer his darker side. In Shakespeare's The Tempest, the figure of Caliban has inspired more nuanced reactions than simple scorn and disgust.
Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame is one of the most celebrated grotesques in literature. Dr. Frankenstein's monster can also be considered a grotesque, as well as The Phantom of the Opera. Other instances of the romantic grotesque are also to be found in E. A. Poe, Hoffmann, the Sturm and Drang movement or Sterne. Romantic grotesque is far more terrible and somber than medieval grotesque, which celebrated laughter and fertility.
The grotesque received a new shape with Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, when a girl meets fantastic grotesque figures in her fantasy world. Carroll manages to make the figures seem less frightful and fit for children's literature, but still utterly strange.
Southern Gothic is the genre most frequently identified with grotesques and William Faulkner is often cited as the ringmaster. Flannery O'Connor wrote, "Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one" ("Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction," 1960). In her short story "A Good Man Is Hard To Find," the Misfit, a serial killer, is clearly a maimed soul, utterly callous to human life but driven to seek the truth.
Checklist
This list is from the index of The Grotesque (1972) by Philip John Thomson, which is somewhat axed towards German literature.
Writers
Arthur Adamov - Aristophanes - Walter Bagehot - Mikhail Bakhtin - John Barth - Samuel Beckett - Bellerive (Joseph Tishler - Gottfried Benn - Henri Bergson - William Blake - Hieronymus Bosch - Bertolt Brecht - Robert Browning - Pieter Brueghel - Jacques Callot - Albert Camus - Elias Canetti - Lewis Carroll - G. K. Chesterton - John Cleveland - Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Ludwig Curtius - Salvador Dalí - Dante - Honoré Daumier - Charles Dickens - Denis Diderot - J. P. Donleavy - Friedrich Dürrenmatt - Max Ernst - William Faulkner - Federico Fellini - Sigmund Freud - Jean Genet - Francisco Goya - Grandville - Günter Grass - Robert Graves - George Grosz - Joseph Heller - E. T. A. Hoffmann - Victor Hugo - Eugène Ionesco - Alfred Jarry - Jean Paul - Franz Kafka - Friederike Kempner - G. Wilson Knight - Comte de Lautréamont - D. H. Lawrence - Edward Lear - C. S. Lewis - Gerhard Mensching - Christian Morgenstern - Justus Moser - Vladimir Nabokov - Joe Orton - Harold Pinter - Edgar Allan Poe - François Rabelais - Raphael - Rainer Maria Rilke - John Ruskin - Friedrich Schlegel - Heinrich Schneegans - William Shakespeare - Tobias Smollett - Michael Steig - Laurence Sterne - John Addington Symonds - Jonathan Swift - Dylan Thomas - Friedrich Theodor Vischer - Vitruvius - Evelyn Waugh - Thomas Wright
Theory
Arthur Clayborough ( The grotesque in English literature (1965)) -
Thomas Cramer (Das Groteske bei E.T.A. Hoffmann. München 1966.) -
Arnold P Hinchliffe (Critical Idiom writer)-
Lee Byron Jennings (The Ludicrous Demon: Aspects of the Grotesque in German Post-Romantic Prose.) -
Wolfgang Kayser (The Grotesque in Art and Literature, 1957) -
