This essay collection reveals how bathos has become so central to literature, fine art, and music. 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.

Born near Manchester in 1948, Anna Mendelssohn authored poetry, fiction, drama, and life writing; she was also a visual artist, musician, and translator. From 1971 to 1977 she served time at Holloway Prison in London due to her involvement in extreme leftist activism. From the early 1980s, Mendelssohn composed nineteen poetry collections and published in journals receptive to her experimental, charged lyrics, among them, Parataxis, Critical Quarterly, and Jacket. Her work appeared in seminal anthologies including Denise Riley's Poets on Writing (1992), Iain Sinclair's Conductors of Chaos (1996), and Rod Mengham and John Kinsella's Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems (2004). Often situated within the British Poetry Revival, Mendelssohn retained a marginal, if constant, presence in the poetry community in Cambridge, England, where she lived from 1983 until her death in 2009. In 2010, her vast archive of writings and drawings was generously donated by her three children to Special Collections at the University of Sussex. Labelled surrealist and ludic, Mendelssohn's poems draw thematically and stylistically on an expansive lineage that encompasses an international array of post-1850 avant-garde figures such as Charles Baudelaire, Gertrude Stein, Anna Ahkmatova, Nazim Hikmet, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Tom Raworth. Closely attuned to the fraught legacy of the female vanguard writer, as well as to disparities of class and race, her poems are impassioned, acute, probing, allusive, and unparalleled. Part aesthetic treatise ("a poem is not going to give precise directions"); part antipolitical manifesto ("the war is too close / for revolution to be understood"); part lament ("softly the sound of woe / gallops"); part celebration of the possibilities of poetic noise and possibility, replete with "scoopydoo sounds", "night[s of] pouring gold", and "high walk[s] into fantasy", Mendelssohn's writing resolutely resists containment or category. This scholarly edition is the first replete collection of the poems Anna Mendelssohn published or prepared for circulation in her lifetime, often writing under the name Grace Lake.

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.

"Stories and Essays of Mina Loy" is the first book-length volume of Mina Loy's narrative writings and critical work ever published. This volume brings together her short fiction, as well as hybrid works that include modernized fairy tales, a Socratic dialogue, and a ballet. Loy's narratives address issues such as abortion and poverty, and what she called "the sex war" is an abiding theme throughout. "Stories and Essays of Mina Loy" also contains dramatic works that parody the bravado and misogyny of Futurism and demonstrate Loy's early, effective use of absurdist technique. Essays and commentaries on aesthetics, historical events, and religion complete this beguiling collection, cementing Mina Loy's place as one of the great writers of the twentieth century.

Exploring a variety of everyday human longings as they arise in modernist fiction, this book poses a direct challenge to psychoanalytic criticism that characterises desire as sexual or powerful in nature. Using continental philosophy as its framework, Prosaic Desires contends that human longings are as endless in kind as they are in manifestation. As philosophy moved into the twentieth century, there was a discernible shift in emphasis from individual wilfulness to the role of the other in desire. In examining this historical trajectory, Prosaic Desires considers Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, but relies primarily on the thinking of Emmanuel Levinas, who radically inverts the traditional philosophical pursuit of subjective autonomy by arguing that the self is defined by endless longing for the other. In an extension of Levinasian theory, Prosaic Desires claims that desire-driven shifts from self to other can be located in modernist literature. The banal longings examined here lie within the poles of sexuality and power, and include desires to know and escape boredom, as well as risibility and anticipation. Authors studied include Joyce, Woolf, Stein, and Beckett, all of whom evince a discernible movement away from self-absorbed, grand narratives of desire toward other-based, evanescent longings throughout their careers. Central to their modernist writings - and in turn, to Prosaic Desires - is the conflicted relationship between daily, finite experience and the limitlessness of human desire.