ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that, by attending to the conceptual and critical frameworks provided by cultural discourse, it is possible to track the spaces in which the grotesque was figured in visual and textual forms. The grotesque bodies forth as both truncation and profusion of form: at once reduction of the body and extension of its physical powers, it is both rupture of the body as ideal sign and projection of the body as vital energy. This doubling process, in which the grotesque is at once kenotic power and kinetic process, generates some particularly intriguing work in late Victorian culture, where certain readings of evolutionary theory could project the fusion of the empirical and the metaphysical. In surveying the critical interpretations of G. F. Watts there is one historical source that places the artist within the landscape of the grotesque. G. K. Chesterton discovers his negative trinity of forces in many aspects of late Victorian cultural life.
