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The Abject of Desire approaches the aestheticization of the unaesthetic via a range of different topics and genres in twentieth-century Anglophone literature and culture. The "experience of disgust", which Winfried Menninghaus describes as "an acute crisis of self-preservation", is correlated with conceptualizations of gender in theories of the abject/abjection. In view of this general crisis of identity in the experience of disgust, the contributions to this volume discuss examples of the aestheticization of the unaesthetic in cultural representations and locate conceptual (re)codings of the body, gender, and identity with regard to the abject as an immediate and uncompromising experience on the one hand, and a social and political phenomenon on the other. Considering a variety of cultural narratives by writers as diverse as Samuel Delany, Sarah Schulman, Joyce Carol Oates, Leslie Marmon Silko, Paul Magrs, J. G. Ballard, Stevie Smith, T. C. Boyle, Joseph Conrad, Poppy Z. Brite, and Will Self, by film directors John Waters and Peter Greenaway, playwrights Girish Karnad and Mahesh Dattani, and "body artist" Gunter von Hagens, the contributors to this volume scrutinize different implications of the ambivalent concept of the abject/abjection. Intro -- The Abject of Desire: The Aestheticization of the Unaesthetic in Contemporary Literature and Culture -- CONTENTS -- Introduction -- On the Matter of Abjection -- Queer Transformations: Renegotiating the Abject in Contemporary Anglo-American Lesbian Fiction -- The Bhibhitsa Rasa in Anglophone Indian Cultural Discourse: The Repugnant and Distasteful at the Level of Gender, Race, and Caste -- The Gothic-Grotesque of Haunted: Joyce Carol Oates's Tales of Abjection -- "Now we know that gay men are just men after all": Abject Sexualities in Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead -- Consuming the Body: Literal and Metaphorical Cannibalism in Peter Greenaway's Films -- Shape-Shifters from the Wilderness: Werewolves Roaming the Twentieth Century -- The Two-…, One-…, None-Sex Model: The Flesh(-)Made Machine in Herman Melville's "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" and J. G. Ballard's Crash -- Fear, Melancholy, and Loss in the Poetry of Stevie Smith -- American Environmentalism and Encounters with the Abject: T. Coraghessan Boyle's A Friend of the Earth -- Abject Cannibalism: Anthropophagic Poetics in Conrad, White, and Tennant - Towards a Critique of Julia Kristeva's Theory of Abjection -- "A Wet Festival of Scarlet": Poppy Z. Brite's (Un)Aesthetics of Murder -- Interior Landscapes: Anatomy Art and the Work of Gunther von Hagens -- Violence, Transgression, and the Fun Factor: The Imagined Atrocities of Will Self's My Idea of Fun -- Notes on Contributors.
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