ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the critical spaces in which cultural discourse generates interpretations of the marginal, the aberrant, the uncanny, the liminal, the vital and the excessive. It deals with a range of little-known, under-researched and extremely important archival materials. By examining painting, sculpture, poetry, literature and design; by engaging with art criticism, cultural history, literary history, historical biography, evolutionary biology and design theory, the book seeks to render the grotesque less obscure, thus demonstrating its entanglement in social, aesthetic, scientific and political thought. It also deals with the double identity of the grotesque as imprisonment and liberation, elimination and elaboration; and this recognition that there is no locus of the grotesque enables contributors to examine its paradoxical nature as the movement between, and mingling of, opposites.
