The beautiful and the monstrous

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The interplay between aesthetic beauty and its counterparts of ugliness and monstrosity has long captivated artists and philosophers. This collection of articles, drawn from a 2008 conference at Cambridge University titled The Beautiful and the Monstrous, reevaluates the concepts and representations of beauty and monstrosity, providing a critical examination of their relationship. Through diverse theoretical approaches, the authors analyze philosophical and artistic expressions spanning from medieval to contemporary literature and culture in the French-speaking world. They challenge traditional perspectives by exploring a wide array of questions related to beauty and monstrosity, including formal, metaphysical, and ethical dimensions of aesthetics, as well as the monstrous threat in psychoanalysis and politics. The collection addresses figures of beauty and monstrosity as social and identitarian constructs, while also examining transformations that blur the lines between the human and the monstrous. Engaging with discussions on aesthetics, metaphysics, ethics, politics, psychoanalysis, feminism, and postcolonialism, and featuring a spectrum of figures from angels to zombies, this work presents a fresh array of perspectives on a crucial transgeneric and transdisciplinary topic.