The Beautiful and the Monstrous

Amaleena Damlé is Lecturer in French at Exeter College, Oxford University. Her primary research interests lie in intersections between twentieth- and twenty-first-century theory and literature, with a particular emphasis on gender and sexuality. Her doctoral thesis examined articulations of female corporeality and transformation in contemporary women’s writing in French and she has written articles on Amélie Nothomb, Ananda Devi and Marie Darrieussecq. Aurélie L’Hostis is a graduate of King’s College, Cambridge, where she completed a doctoral thesis on the contribution of French Caribbean literature to the creation of a historical consciousness in the region. Her publications include articles on the current debate around historical memory and slavery in France and the representation of Antillean traumatic history in works by Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau.

Contents: Amaleena Damlé: Introduction - Kristy Guneratne: Beauty and the Place of the Subject: Reading Merleau-Ponty after Kant - Dominique Chaigne: The Beauty of 'Lame' Sonnets - Fiona Gatty: Beauty and Monstrosity in Nineteenth-Century French Art Criticism 1801-1824 - Cécilia A. Falgas-Ravry: A Dance of Angels and Monsters: Victor Hugo's Caducean Aesthetics - Catherine Markey: 'Une oeuvre barbare et délicate': Hervé Guibert and the Limits of Representation - Anna Magdalena Elsner: Uncanny Balbec: Crypts, Nightmares and Phantoms in 'Les intermittences du coeur' - Nicolas Valazza: The Flower and the Monster: On Huysmans' Painters - Klem James: Surrealism and the Sublime or the Vertiginous Plunging into the Real - Martin Llewellyn: Neither Beast nor Man: 'Qu'est que c'est qu'un monstre' ? - Miranda Griffin: The Beastly and the Courtly in Medieval Tales of Transformation: Bisclavret, Melion and Mélusine - Ruth G. Vorstman: Diane as Beauty: Three Seventeenth-Century Examples - Jennifer Yee: The Black Maid and her Mistress in Manet and Zola - Elizabeth Lindley: The Monstrous Female: Images of Abjection in Marie NDiaye's Hilda - Andrew Asibong: Haitian Bride of Frankenstein: Disintegrating Beauty, Monstrousness and 'Race' in Jacques Stephen Alexis's 'Chronique d'un faux-amour'.