ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of the Romantic grotesque in relation to the taste for terror or horror in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It discusses how the taste for terror shapes the Romantic concept of beauty and how Charles Baudelaire ventures further than anyone else in extracting beauty or charm from/of terror, or broadly, the desirable from/of the undesirable — as the title Les Fleurs du mal suggests. Baudelaire hyperbolizes — or semioticizes — these metaphors to the point that it is no longer possible to draw a clear line between the literal and the figurative, nonsense and sense; moreover, he endows these metaphors with equally strong opposite sensational forces and thereby gives the reader no room for favouring one force over the other. The pervasiveness of the demonic in the Romantic grotesque manifests itself in Delacroix's Méphistophélés dans les airs, one of eighteen lithographs produced in 1828 for a French edition of Goethe's Faust.
