Abstract
While English Renaissance authors insist that literature should morally improve readers, they are responsible for some of the most compelling representations of evil ever created. Sinister Aesthetics theorizes the appeal of evil and analyzes its literary and religious implications in The Faerie Queene, Richard III, popular print, and Paradise Lost. The introduction describes the book’s argument, drawing on a variety of critical perspectives from new historicism to horror film theory. It argues that aesthetics are crucial for understanding the literary appeal of evil as well as early modern English religious sensibilities, and it offers “sinister aesthetics” as a theoretical paradigm for understanding this appeal. It describes how the sinister affects early modern responses to the theological problem of evil, most notably Paradise Lost.
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Notes
- 1.
See Susan J. Wolfson’s “Reading for Form” (2000) and the other essays in the Modern Language Quarterly special issue of the same title, Mark David Rasmussen’s collection Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements (2002), Stephen Cohen’s collection Shakespeare and Historical Formalism (2007), Marjorie Levinson’s “What Is New Formalism?” (2007), Verena Theile and Linda Tredennick’s collection New Formalisms and Literary Theory (2013), and Frederic V. Bogel’s New Formalist Criticism: Theory and Practice (2013).
- 2.
See Gail Kern Paster’s Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (2004) and several collections, including Reading the Early Modern Passions (2003) edited by Paster, Katharine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson; Politics and the Passions, 1500–1850 (2006) edited by Victoria Kahn, Neil Saccamano, and Daniela Coli; and Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture (2013) edited by Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis.
- 3.
Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti, in “The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies” (2004), contrast Marxist scholars who “decode religious language and ideas as mystifications of economic, political, and social conditions and relationships, usually assuming that religion itself is a form of ‘false consciousness’” with scholars who “take seriously religious beliefs, ideas, and history” (168).
- 4.
See, for example, Shuger’s Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (1990).
- 5.
C. S. Lewis’s A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942) and Stanley Fish’s Surprised by Sin (1967) have helped promulgate this perspective among Miltonists.
- 6.
Paradise Lost passages are cited by book and line number.
- 7.
See, for example, Rumrich’s 1996 study, Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation (1).
- 8.
Stephen Gosson’s Playes Confuted in Five Actions (1582), for example, castigates playgoing as sitting in “the chaire of pestilence” (B7, Kinney 154) and eating the “pollution of idoles” (B8v, Kinney 155). On retrospective moralizing, see my Chapter 2, especially regarding Tasso’s “Allegoria del poema” and Lodovico Ricchieri’s comparison of allegory to an antidote.
- 9.
Most scholars of monstrosity focus on the monster as a “categorical violation”; see, for example, Jeffrey J. Cohen’s “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” (1996), which associates monsters with “Category Crisis” (6). I emphasize the monster’s status as a “fictional confection.”
- 10.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, whom I quote in the epilogue, uses “beautiful” in this sense.
- 11.
In this book, “demonic” and “infernal” are by default aesthetic terms, not moral ones, pertaining to the representational traditions of demons and hell.
- 12.
As an umbrella term for a variety of deviations from normative expectations, the sinister resembles Bryan Reynolds’s concept of the “transversal,” which he describes in Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (2006) and elsewhere. But the transversal is constituted by its boundary violations (2, 37), whereas the sinister ultimately represents an alternative aesthetic order.
- 13.
For a seminal new historicist example, see Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), where the binary terms are “authority” and “alien” (9). For Greenblatt’s use of the terms “subversion” and “containment,” see Shakespearean Negotiations (1988; 30–39 and elsewhere).
- 14.
See also Eric B. Song’s Kristevan reading of Milton in Dominion Undeserved: Milton and the Perils of Creation (2013; 5–7).
- 15.
Joel Fineman’s Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye (1986) attempts to move beyond this limitation, arguing that the dark lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets “is not a negative version of, nor is she an alternative to, conventional sonneteering ideals” but “the perversion of any such idealization, not simply the lowest rung on the ladder of love, but a power that kicks the ladder out altogether” (58–59). But this approach still relies on negation, rather than attending to what Linda Charnes, in Notorious Identity (1993), calls “the structural operations of transgression” (47).
- 16.
This suspicion is not new. Louis Adrian Montrose’s The Purpose of Playing (1996; 12) traces it back to Raymond Williams’s Marxism and Literature (1977).
- 17.
Another largely post-Renaissance term overlapping with the sinister is the macabre, which can suggest a pleasurable gruesomeness and is applied to literary style beginning in the late 1800s (OED A.2).
- 18.
Eco’s formulation is based on Karl Rosenkranz’s Aesthetic of Ugliness (Aesthetik des Häßlichen, 1853). Because the sinister encompasses Eco’s pleasurable ugliness, I typically reserve the term “ugly” for things that are genuinely unpleasant, with some exceptions when it is shorthand for “that which is conventionally considered ugly.”
- 19.
Like the sublime, the grotesque partly overlaps with the sinister, partly diverges from it, and has undergone significant shifts of meaning since the early modern period. By the 1650s, “grotesque” could imply an aesthetics of monstrosity and “distortion or unnatural combinations” (OED B.2.a). According to the OED, Ben Jonson’s Timber says the “vulgar” associate it “unaptly” with “Chimaera’s,” but at least through 1823 it could also be characterized as a “light, gay, and beautiful style of ornament” (OED A.1.a). Milton uses “grotesque” to describe the unruly foliage of Eden in Paradise Lost (4.136); see Janice Koelb’s The Poetics of Description: Imagined Places in European Literature (2006; 90–91). Following Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World (1965), early modernists often link the grotesque with the carnivalesque; see, for example, Neil Rhodes’s Elizabethan Grotesque (1980). Alison Milbank’s “Divine Beauty and the Grotesque in Dante’s Paradiso” (2009), however, connects the grotesque with divine punishment. Like the sinister, the carnivalesque inverts social and cultural expectations, and employs the grotesque and the Vice archetype; but the carnivalesque differs in its festive, comic, and redemptive connotations. See Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986) and Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat (2002).
- 20.
Modern theologians remain interested in the relationship between aesthetics and the problem of evil. John Hick’s influential Evil and the God of Love (1966) opposes Augustine’s “aesthetic theodicy” (93), while Philip Tallon’s The Poetics of Evil: Toward an Aesthetic Theodicy (2012) argues “that aesthetic considerations play a valuable role in the task of theodicy” (xviii). Marilyn McCord Adams’s book Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (1999) opens by acknowledging that “writing or reading about evil affords opportunity to taste that delicious dread of picking and tasting fruits primordially disallowed” (1).
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Slotkin, J.E. (2017). Introduction: Representing Evil in Early Modern England. In: Sinister Aesthetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52797-0_1
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