Faces and Masks of Ugliness in Literary Narratives

This collection of essays deals primarily with the idea of ugliness as represented in a variety of literary narratives in English. Shakespeare’s Caliban and his depiction in The Tempest and its contemporary film adaptations are dealt with, just as Joseph Merrick’s innocence of ugliness and Swinburne’s aesthetic transgressions of the late-Victorian period are discussed. Moreover, D. H. Lawrence’s monstrosity of agedness is examined, as well as postcolonial discourses of ugliness in Patrick White, J. M. Coetzee and the Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah. The volume also contains essays on representations of American Indian captivity narratives, on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s voice in the debate on evil, and on In-yer-face theatre in the Irish context, i.e. Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan and Enda Walsh’s Bedbound.