On Bathos: Literature, Art, Music

(Paperback, NIPPOD)

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While the sublime has garnered a great deal of critical attention over the past twenty years, its counterpart, bathos, has yet to receive any extended treatment. Generally understood as an inadvertent descent to the low, vulgar, and ludicrous in writing or art, the term "bathos" was popularised by Pope, who used it to satirise his contemporaries. Ironically likening bathos to the depths of profundity, Pope lauded his peers for their influential writings whilst openly deriding their absurd misuses of figure and rhetorical device. Pope's method proved prophetic: today, artists regularly celebrate and incorporate bathetic practice.

This essay collection considers how bathos has become so central to literature, fine art, and music. The innovative and diverse contributions assess the consequences of this endemic inversion of aesthetic standards, and consider where artistic production might go after hitting, and so comfortably inhabiting, rock bottom.

Reviews

"We think we know what bathos is and how to judge it. This fascinating collection of essays shows just how mistaken we have been. Bathos is a concept that productively unsettles many existing concepts of reception, interpretation, literary value, affect, and ideology. With scholarly wit and a highly readable awareness of the potential bathos of commentary, these essays explore the origins of the idea and its contribution to modern culture, in a compelling series of close readings of both familiar and surprising manifestations in art, poetry, fiction, and music. At the risk of a bathetic blurb, a risk that these poets and scholars suggest is almost unavoidable, I will say that this is an essential volume for anyone wishing to follow current developments in the literary and cultural study of the highs and lows of modern arts." -- Professor Peter Middleton, University of Southampton, UK
"Who would have thought that an essay collection on the topic of bathos would be a terrific book...Yet while the sublime still appeals to artists' imaginative intensities, it seems that it is no longer a viable imaginative option for engaging modern reality. Indeed, as the editors suggest in their superb introduction, 'In our own time "sinking" has become the most deliberate of arts and perhaps the only one we have." Charles Altieri University of California, Berkeley, USAin The European Journal of English Studies
... superbly entertaining... the neophyte or uninitiated reader is bound to learn something from this ingenious collection. -- The Use of English

Author Bio

Sara Crangle is a Lecturer at the University of Sussex, UK, and the author of Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowing, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation (Edinburgh UP).
Peter Nicholls is Professor of English at New York University, USA. His books include George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism (OUP 2007), Modernisms: A Literary Guide (2nd ed., Palgrave Macmillan 2009) and Politics, Economics and Writing (Macmillan 1984).