Routledge Revivals: Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque (1999)

Book excerpt: Originally published in 1999, Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque is the first fully interdisciplinary study of the subject and examines a wide range of sources and materials to provide new readings between ‘style’ and ‘concept’. The book provides an original analysis of key articulations of the Grotesque in the literary culture of Ruskin, Browning and Dickens, where represents the eruptions, intensities, confusions and disturbed vitality of modern cultural experience such as the scientific revolution associated with Darwin and the nature of industrial society.