Philip John Thomson
By medium: abnormal - ambiguity - ambivalence - academic - grotesque - grotesque literature
The basic definition of the grotesque: the unresolved clash of incompatibles in work and response. It is significant this clash is paralleled by the ambivalent nature of the abnormal as present in the grotesque: we might consider a secondary definition of the grotesque to be the 'ambivalently abnormal' (Philip Thomson, The Grotesque (1972), 27).
The Grotesque (1972) - Philip John Thomson
The Grotesque (1972) - Philip John Thomson [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
An index of the grotesque
This list is from the index of The Grotesque (1972) by Philip John Thomson. They are mostly literary figures from the English and German literary world. A Wikipedia list can be found here.
Arthur Adamov - Aristophanes - Walter Bagehot - Mikhail Bakhtin - John Barth - Samuel Beckett - Bellerive (Joseph Tishler (1871-1957)) - 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 - Arthur Clayborough ( The grotesque in English literature (1965)) - John Cleveland - Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Thomas Cramer (Das Groteske bei E.T.A. Hoffmann. München 1966.) - Ludwig Curtius [1] - Salvador Dali - 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 - A. P. Hinchcliffe - E. T. A. Hoffmann - Victor Hugo - Eugène Ionesco - Alfred Jarry - Jean Paul - Lee Byron Jennings (The Ludicrous Demon: Aspects of the Grotesque in German Post-Romantic Prose.) - Franz Kafka - Wolfgang Kayser (The Grotesque in Art and Literature (1957)) - Friederike Kempner [2]- G. Wilson Knight - Comte de Lautréamont - D. H. Lawrence - Edward Lear - C. S. Lewis - Gerhard Mensching (Lemmi und die Schmöker) - 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 [3] - William Shakespeare - Tobias Smollett - Michael Steig (Dickens and Phiz (1978) - Michael Steig)- Laurence Sterne - John Addington Symonds - Jonathan Swift - Dylan Thomas - Friedrich Theodor Vischer - Vitruvius - Evelyn Waugh - Thomas Wright
Tropes of the grotesque
Abnormality - The Absurd - Aggressiveness and Alienation - The Bizarre - Caricature - The Comic - The Comic and the Terrifying - Disharmony - Extravagance and Exaggeration - Irony - The Macabre - Parody - "Playfulness" - The Psychological Effect - Satire - Satiric and the Playful Grotesque - Tension and Unresolvability - The Unintentional Grotesque
Additinal list of authors who have been considered to work in the grotesque
This list is not by Thomson but merits inclusion
- Edward Albee (American)
- Fernando Arrabal (Spanish)
- Yaclav Havel (Czech)
- N. F. Simpson (British)