Since the grotesque and the sublime hover at the intersection of several disciplines, my methodology is concomitantly interdisciplinary and feminist: philosophy, rhetoric, musicology, psychoanalysis, narratology, history, and cognitive science all serve to shift a canonized aesthetics of the sublime and the grotesque toward an ethics of the interhuman.

The grotesque - the exagggerated, the deformed, the monstrous - has been a well-considered subject for students of comparative literature and art. In a major addition to the literature of art, cultural criticism and feminist studies, Mary Russo re-examines the grotesque in the light of gender, exploring the works of Angela Carter David Cronenberg Bahktin Kristeva Freud Zizek. Mary Russo looks at the portrayal of the grotesque in Western culture and by combining the iconographic and the historical, locates the role of the woman's body in the discourse of the grotesque.

This is the first English-language anthology to provide a compendium of primary source material on the sublime. The book takes a chronological approach, covering the earliest ancient traditions up through the early and late modern periods and into contemporary theory. It takes an inclusive, interdisciplinary approach to this key concept in aesthetics and criticism, representing voices and traditions that have often been excluded. As such, it will be of use and interest across the humanities and allied disciplines, from art criticism and literary theory, to gender and cultural studies and environmental philosophy. The anthology includes brief introductions to each selection, reading or discussion questions, suggestions for further reading, a bibliography and index – making it an ideal text for building a course around or for further study. The book's apparatus provides valuable context for exploring the history and contemporary views of the sublime.

European male writers established and developed the definitions and theories of the sublime, thus creating a gendered discourse and in turn inviting a feminist perspective. By examining the poetics of Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop, I find that there are alternative approaches to the sublime. Emily Dickinson engenders the sublime by resisting the romantic sublime and abandoning the subject/ object relationship. Further, by being a woman writer in her historico-cultural circumstance while simultaneously creating a style that deviates from the traditional standards of poetics, Dickinson offers an alternative in what I will call the reciprocal sublime. Bishop, by allowing the subject of the poem to remain between two realms rather than leaving one and entering another, employs what I will call the liminal sublime. Similarly, Bishop uses imagination and the grotesque as a catalyst to the sublime moment, thus subverting Kant's domination model (reason over imagination) and resisting the degradation associated with the grotesque.

Toward a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence brings together major feminist thinkers to debate Cavarero’s call for a postural ethics of nonviolence and a sociality rooted in bodily interdependence. Toward a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence brings together three major feminist thinkers—Adriana Cavarero, Judith Butler, and Bonnie Honig—to debate Cavarero’s call for a postural ethics of nonviolence. The book consists of three longer essays by Cavarero, Butler, and Honig, followed by shorter responses by a range of scholars that widen the dialogue, drawing on post-Marxism, Italian feminism, queer theory, and lesbian and gay politics. Together, the authors contest the boundaries of their common project for a pluralistic, heterogeneous, but urgent feminist ethics of nonviolence.

This book reads the Gothic corpus with a thoroughly postmodern critical apparatus, pointing out that the Gothic Sublime anticipates our own doomed desire to pass beyond the hyperreal. A highly sophisticated theoretical reading of key texts of the Gothic, this book allows the reader to re-live the Gothic, not simply as a nostalgic relic or a pre-romantic aberration, but as a living presence that has strong resonances with the postmodern condition.