Search

Este trabajo elabora una configuración de la autora implícita de Fondo de armario (2019), de Patricia Esteban Erlés (Zaragoza, 1972), con base en sus columnas. En una primera instancia, se presentan las similitudes entre estas, los microrrelatos y otros géneros literarios. Dado que muchas son autobiográficas, se infieren aspectos de la vida de la autora y sus intereses tamizados por la memoria y la escritura autobiográfica. Los textos de denuncia muestran sus principales inquietudes y su empatía hacia los desprotegidos, entre ellos las mujeres, a quienes se dedica un buen número de artículos, por lo que se abordará la perspectiva feminista de los textos. Finalmente, la tendencia de la autora a destacar los aspectos crudos y gráficos de ciertos episodios remiten a su afición por los detalles macabros de las historias, los cuales, fuera del mundo ficcional, resultan más aterradores y cobran una nueva dimensión.

Le Tableau tragique ou le funeste amour de Florivale et d’Orcade de Joyel, paru à Douai en 1633, texte dont on ne connaît que quelques exemplaires dans les bibliothèques européennes, est considéré par Jean Rousset comme « la moins arcadienne et la plus macabre des pastorales ». Au-delà de l’obsession de la décomposition des corps qui habite tous les personnages – faisant d’eux littéralement des morts-vivants – le surnaturel se manifeste par l’intervention des démons, les cortèges d’ombres menaçantes, les animaux maléfiques, mais aussi et surtout par l’action des morts revenus à la vie. Les « fantaisies poetiques » et « autres œuvres » qui accompagnent la pièce offrent un aperçu sur la vie théâtrale douaisienne et inscrivent clairement l’œuvre dans un projet esthétique, qui invite à se questionner sur le caractère outrancier, « fantastique » mais peut-être aussi grotesque, de ce théâtre des spectres. Joyel’s Tableau tragique ou le funeste amour de Florivale et d'Orcade, published in Douai in 1633, a text of which only a few copies are identified in European libraries, is considered by Jean Rousset to be ‘the least Arcadian and the most macabre pastoral’. Beyond the obsession with the decomposition of bodies that inhabits all the characters – literally making them the living dead – the supernatural is revealed by the intervention of demons, processions of threatening shadows, evil animals, but also and above all by the action of the dead who have come back to life. The ‘fantaisies poetiques’ and ‘autres œuvres’ that accompany the play offer an overview of Douai’s theatrical life and clearly place the work within an aesthetic project, which invites us to question the outrageous, ‘fantastic’ but perhaps also grotesque nature of this theatre of spectres.

Why do some organized crime groups (OCGs) carry out face-to-face killings where perpetrators debase their victims and defile their bodies? Leading criminologists contend that OCGs carry out extreme killings deliberately to attain specific performance objectives. Conversely, psycho-sociological scholars argue that extreme killings only occur in situations that affect perpetrators’ reasoning and emotions. In their view, these situations are largely beyond OCGs’ control. I argue that analyzing extreme killings as organizational rituals can contribute to reconciling these seemingly conflicting views. More specifically, I contend that the OCG known as Los Zetas ritualizes executions to generate the conditions that make extreme violence possible. Through ritualization, Los Zetas influences executioners’ perceptions of extreme behavior from something abhorrent into something valued, desirable, and enjoyable. Once the conditions conducive to extreme violence emerge, Los Zetas exploits it to attain utilitarian objectives.

History is littered with tales of the absurd, odd, and unusual. From Gorgons and mermaids to bearded ladies and elephant men, people have, for centuries, been fascinated by those who deviate from physical and mental social norms. Such fascinations seemed to peak during the 19th century when showmen, like PT Barnum, bought and exhibited those deemed too different and macabre for “normal” society. However, as science and medicine progressed, and the protection of human rights became more important, freak shows and travelling sideshows dwindled (Nicholas & Chambers, 2016). Society’s fascination with the unusual though, did not. Despite increased political correctness and calls to end “fat shaming,” bullying and the like, reality television appears to encourage “a dehumanising process that actually lessens our regard for other people” (Sardar, 2000). While some writers have considered how reality television exploits stereotypes and links social norms to hegemonic whiteness (Cooke-Jackson & Hansen, 2008; Rennels, 2015), few have commented on the similarities between such programming and the stylings of the 19th century freak show. Utilising Thomson’s (1996) concept of freak discourse, and Bogdan’s (1996) assessment of freak narrative, this article examines how reality television programming as a genre, despite its varied plots, uses a narrative formula that can be likened to 19th century freak shows to enhance its storylines and “produce a human spectacle” (Thomson, 1996, p. 7).

Nineteenth-century critics saw in Baudelaire, author of the poem «Une charogne», the heir to the macabre and mystifying inspiration of Petrus Borel, nicknamed “the lycanthrope”. This rapprochement, very frequent in the years 1860-1890, irritated Baudelaire, who had a deep sympathy for Borel while considering him as a counter-example. This context explains why the article that Baudelaire published on Borel in the “Revue fantaisiste” on July 15, 1861, has a strong polemical tinge.

Alexander McQueen (1969-2010) changed the fashion industry and history forever with his innovations and runaway shows that verged on performance art. His talent for tailoring matched the strong narrative and originality of his garments. Some of them were destined for commercial consumption and catered to the masses, but most of them were works of art grown from a vivid yet macabre imagination. He refused the common grounds of fashion to focus on themes usually ignored, such as fetishism, violence, death and mental disturbance. Therefore, he aimed to transcend the usual and reach for the sublime as he created a fantasy world out of his own tormented mind. His Romantic and Gothic inspired work mirrored the anxieties of our times, and raised fashion to an art form on its own, thus prompting a reflection on the affiliation between fashion, visual arts and literature., Alexander McQueen (1969-2010) a changé l’histoire et l’industrie de la haute-couture de façon irrémédiable par ses innovations ainsi que ses défilés qui touchaient à la performance artistique. Ses talents de couturier étaient égalés par la forte ligne narrative et l’originalité de ses créations. Certaines étaient destinées aux circuits commerciaux et répondaient aux demandes du marché, mais la plupart étaient de véritables œuvres d’art dérivées d’une imagination vive quoique macabre. McQueen refusait les lieux communs de la haute-couture et leur préférait des thèmes généralement ignorés tels que le fétichisme, la violence, la mort, ou encore les troubles mentaux. Ainsi, il espérait transcender l’ordinaire et atteindre le sublime en créant son propre univers, né de son esprit tourmenté. Son travail, inspiré par les courants artistiques romantique et gothique, reflétait les anxiétés de notre époque, et a élevé la mode au rang d’expression artistique, permettant une réflexion sur l’alliance entre la mode, les arts visuels et la littérature.

The paper focuses on community policing, a recent concept taken to as additive to law enforcement which has become everyone’s allegorical remedy for policing problems in the global system. The concept as an agenda for policing reform, has received numerous attentions, having received scholarly debates in various. In Sub-Saharan African region, and most especially Nigerian state where issues of crimes and insecurity have taken different dimensions, there have been agitations and a need to get an alternative to security structure in the country. Officers of the Nigeria Police are conspicuously overwhelmed in the discharge of their fundamental duties, there is, therefore, the need for community policing to complement their efforts in the maintenance of internal security and protection of lives and property. Therefore, this study interrogates the factors aiding the surge of crimes and ineffective policing in Nigeria, and also examines the merits derivable in subscription to the community policing viewpoint. The study gathered its data from secondary sources. The study in its findings, reveal that: a disconnect between the people and government, interagency rivalry, absence of intelligence gathering on the part of the security agencies, non-prosecution of violence perpetrators, amongst others, aid the surge of crimes and ineffective policing in the state. It as well argues that community policing would definitely go a long way in reversing the current state of insecurity for good in Nigeria. The paper, in its recommendations, submits that both the police and the public should jettison the rigid notion of rivalries between them, and should cultivate the force of togetherness and become partners in the course of securing lives and property in the society.

"The present paper analyzes the possible functions of medieval stove tile depictions consisting of violent scenes and images of devils and devilish monsters. The depictions on mold‑made stove tiles can be considered the first mass produced images before print and are thus valuable sources in the research of popular culture, especially in Central and Eastern Europe where print made a later appearance. The focus here is on macabre depictions of tiles (devilish monsters, scenes of deadly violence, demons, and afterlife torments). My hypothesis is that though ‘lighter’ than macabre scenes in other arts, such images on stove tiles might have played an apotropaic function, meant to repel or distract maleficent spirits that could cause people harm through stove malfunctions. Still, one cannot exclude the moralizing, instructive, and purely entertaining functions of such depictions."

The subject of the study is the topos of dance. The article identifies the factors of its actualization in the literature of the late 19th — early 20th centuries; considers the origins of its reading through the prism of Eros and Thanatos; analyses works with “dance” imagery, and clarifies its role in the texts poetics. These tasks aim to outline the author’s models that utilize “Dance of the Seven Veils” and “The Danse Macabre”. Comparative, mythological-archetypal, historical-cultural research methods have been applied to study the specifics of dance interpretation in the aesthetic coordinates of modernism. The interest in these aspects of the archetypal topos existence and the need to define the author’s representations as variants of the national determine the relevance of the study. Results of the Study. The reminiscences of Salome’s dance and the Dance of Death are due to the perception of the era as a “plague age”; aesthetic understanding of dance as a personification of the phenomenon of death; interest in the body as a socio-cultural concept and its sensory cognition; a revival of the art of dance; interest in the theme of the East; popularity of erotic motives and the character “woman-child”; the relevance of archetypal codes for the triad “life — death — art”. Charles Baudelaire’s poetry is analyzed as the origins of the modernist interpretation of dance at the intersection of Thanatos and Eros. His dance imagery is characterized by its ironic understanding through the prism of existential categories and interpretation in the context of eschatological and aesthetic issues. The development of the Baudelaire tradition is reflected in the examples of the “new drama”: Lesya Ukrainka reminiscences Salome’s dance as an embodiment of bodily freedom (The Forest Song) and dance as a sign of humility and choice of “death” of the spirit (The Orgy). In Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House the tarantella is both an image of a festive atmosphere and a sign of falsified values of the characters. The dance heralds the catastrophe of Nora’s “puppet” house and at the same time opens up prospects for finding one’s self. The Danse Macabre for Mykhailo Kotsyubynsky (Ivan’s dance with Chuhaister in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors) and Thomas Mann (dance seen in Aschenbach’s bizarre dream in Death in Venice) is connected with the infernal. It symbolizes the heroes’ awareness of the new “reality” and the transition to another level of worldview; concentrates on thanatological and erotic and defines the complex relationship of mind and body as issues of works. For both characters, the dance is a warning of imminent physical death. But for Aschenbach, it is also the last act of dying as an artist, a symbol of his soul’s death. In contrast, for Ivan, it is a duel-dance to protect his beloved, reunion with whom gains his integrity.

U radu je analiziran prozni opus Frana Galovića koji obiluje prizorima smrti i ostalim motivima povezanima s njom. Prikazi smrti predstavljeni su kronološki prema godini nastanka djela, ali i grupirani i objašnjeni prema stilskim odrednicama. Galović neprekidno mijenja i modificira svoj stav o smrti, a osobito u kasnijim radovima zanima ga i problem onoga što dolazi poslije smrti. Sve to rezultira vrtlogom ubojstava i samoubojstava, odnosno sveprožimajućim mrtvačkim plesom (danse macabre), pa i svojevrsnom fascinacijom smrću i rušenjem svih barijera te, po nekim istraživačima, njegovim ponajboljim djelima, ali i povezanošću s biografskim elementima. Prikaz smrti i sa smrću povezanih fenomena u manje istraživanom području Galovićeve proze nametnuo nam se, stoga, kao poseban rakurs u tumačenju djela ovoga pisca., This paper analyses the prose of Fran Galović, which abounds in death scenes and motifs related to it. The depictions of death are arranged chronologically according to the year of origin, but also grouped and explained according to stylistic determinants. Galović constantly changes and modifies his attitude about death, and especially in later works he is interested in the problem of what comes after death. His thoughts result in a whirlwind of suicides, dance macabre, fascination with death and breaking down all barriers. According to some theorists, those represent his best works, and a connection with biographical elements. The portrayal of death and death-related phenomena in the less researched area of Galović’s prose has therefore imposed as a necessary way of interpreting this writer.

This article discusses the rubrics introducing the characters in the incunables of the middle French Danse Macabre. These rubrics are not a part of the original text, but of a paratext added later during the transmission of the originally hybrid work of art, which was based on the fusion of text and image. This study shows that the distribution of the variants in the rubrics is strictly related to the particularities of the dissemination of the Danse Macabre. The rubrics in the printed tradition are compared to those in the extant manuscripts transmitting the same text; text-image relations are also taken into account. In particular, the study of the rubrics allows to see that the influence of the iconographic elements on the text changes significantly with the passage of the Danse Macabre from manuscript to print.

There has been a reignition of interest in the use of visual art in legal scholarship. 1 Likewise, there has been a reassessment of the intersections between law and time, that seeks to consider th...

Neurotoxicologist Deborah Cory-Slechta had a somewhat macabre introduction to her current area of research. In 2012, a colleague at the University of Rochester kept pestering her, “You have to look...

espanolEn este articulo se analiza la novela Noli me tangere de Jose Rizal en el contexto de la liberacion de Filipinas del imperio espanol. Tal como Nikolai Gogol no solo describe realisticamente en Almas muertas los sufrimientos de Rusia, sobre todo de los campesinos, y una de sus causas, la falta de educacion de las clases altas o medias, sino que tambien se burla de ello, al igual que la “novela tagala”, de Rizal, la cual comparte la misma tradicion grotesca, suma la irrision a la descripcion realista de la opresion del pueblo filipino. A la luz de la historia de la literatura mundial, como la presentan Mikhail Bakhtin, Iuri Mann y Franca Beltrame, y con la ayuda de la critica de E. San Juan, Jr., se muestra que ese realismo va mas alla del aspecto politicosocial. Para los autores, el aspecto macabro es importante, es decir, la transgresion desvergonzada, absurda y ridicula del ambito de los muertos por parte de los vivos. EnglishIn this study we analyze Noli me tangere by Jose Rizal, in the context of the Filipino liberation movement. Just like Nikolai Gogol’s poem Dead Souls not only describes realistically the sufferings of Russia, and most of all, of the serf farmers, and one of its main reasons, the lack of education in the middle and higher classes, but also makes fun of it, likewise, Rizal’s “novela tagala”, which belongs to the same artistic tradition of the grotesque, combines the realistic description of the Filipino people’s suffering with ridicule. With the help of the history of world literature, as presented by Mikhail Bakhtin, Yuri Mann and Franca Beltrame, and in the light of E. San Juan, Jr.’s critical method we show that realism in both writers’ works goes beyond political and social aspects and is strongly imbued with the macabre aspect, i.e. the shameless, absurd and ridiculous transgression of the realm of the dead by the living.

The object of this research is the theatricalizes “Danse Macabre” in the Catalonian city Verges is the only extant in La Bisbal province testimony of the popular in Medieval Western Europe traditions of Macabre. “Danse Macabre” in Verges takes place on a Maundy Thursday: five actors-skeletons with the symbolic inventory in their hands – scythe, colors, urns with ash and hourglass – move to the sounds of drums and remind spectators on the brevity of life and implacable approach of death. The presence of Macabre images in the Medieval art and literature is substantiated by crisis mentality caused by the Black Death and military conflicts. The conclusions on the archetypical features and authentic elements in Catalonian “Danse Macabre” are based on the research of historical-literary context, examination of the main scientific hypothesis regarding the Iberian trace in the emergence of this synthetic genre form, analysis of the circle beginning of Catalonian “Dance Macabre” under the influence of oriental presence on the peninsula. The author assesses modern approaches towards “Danse Macabre” with their sad procession of the representatives of all social classes to mass manifestations of democratic spirit of irreconcilability and resistance, democratic satire that is fighting for social equality facing death and acting against impunity of the powers that be.

Edgar Allan Poe's personal religious feeling may have been uncertain, but the influence of the Bible on his works is not in question. Poems such as “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee,” for instance, allude to ideal states not unlike that described in the creation story of Genesis, particularly the scriptural verses depicting the Garden of Eden. As in the biblical creation story—which provides the literary model of “paradise”—so in these poems: death has a lasting and adverse effect on happiness. In Genesis and “Annabel Lee,” moreover, malign influence undoes archetypal innocence. In much of his prose, too, Poe includes (sometimes telling) rhetorical references to the creation story, from the forbidden wisdom of “Ligeia” to the picturesque vale of “Landor's Cottage.” Allegorically, though, Poe's short story “The Black Cat” treats the creation story of Genesis 1–4 remarkably fully, moving beyond allusion as it essentially retells those chapters of Genesis in macabre form, describing an ideal state, original sin, and murder—the very outline of the biblical narrative itself.

Background: To help shed light on the peculiar circumstances surrounding the death of the famed macabre and mystery writer, poet, editor, and literary critic, we explored the potential role of depression in the life and death of Edgar Allan Poe via his written language. Method: Using computerized language analysis, we analyzed works from Poe’s corpora of personal letters (N = 309), poems (N = 49), and short stories (N = 63), and investigated whether a pattern of linguistic cues consistent with depression and suicidal cognition were discernible throughout the writer’s life, particularly in his final years. Building on past work, language scores were collapsed into a composite depression metric for each text. Data from each work type was subsequently compiled and graphed into a single plot by year, with scores exceeding the 95th percentile (p

L’importance d’Abel Gance pour le développement du cinéma français est bien connue, bien documentée, mais qu’en est-il de son importance pour l’invention des films de zombies ? Sur cette question, je cède la parole à Glenn Kay, auteur de Zombie Movies : The Ultimate Guide (2008) : J’accuse ! (1938): This well-regarded, politically charged French war film was directed by Abel Gance, who also helmed the classic 1927 film Napoléon. The story was originally filmed by Gance on a smaller scale in 1...

The concepts ‘classical antiquity’ and ‘heavy metal music’ may appear to be worlds apart. Not only are they separated chronologically but each belongs to an entirely different habitus. While the classical is associated with tradition, good taste and harmony, heavy metal is, at least by some, associated with the very opposite: the breaking of tradition, bad taste and disharmony. And yet, as the present book shows, a very large number of heavy metal bands reference antiquity in various ways, including exponents of Thrash Metal, characterised by speed and aggressiveness; Death Metal, characterised by macabre subject matter and growling vocals; Black Metal with related subject matter but less polished style, and other subgenres. Bands from countries ranging from Greece and Italy to Scandinavia incorporate classical quotations in their lyrics or rewrite ancient texts and myths. Some sing in Greek or Latin, others in Italian or English. The titles of songs, such as Hymn to Apollo, Hymn to Zeus, Medusa and so on, further show the classical inspiration.

This chapter examines the politics and rhetoric of recording a famine in early colonial archives. It reads the travel reports of servants of the English and Dutch East India Companies alongside the internal correspondence of the East India Company (EIC) to deconstruct the colonial biases that resulted in an institutional failure in managing the famine. The stakes for reading the Chiattorer Monnontor in the various colonial records such as the EIC's official correspondence and the travel reports of its employees are high, especially in the context of authr's recent interest in colonial famines. The EIC initially looked to gain access to the markets in western India, and thus the first Company ship to reach the Indian subcontinent, the Hector, arrived in Surat as early as 1608. During eighteenth century, the EIC's acquisition of zamindari rights continued, much to the growing alarm of the nawabs of Bengal, who at the time had practically declared their autonomy from a weakening Mughal Empire.

This article argues that the cannibalistic connotations in ‘Hamlet’ may be interpreted in the context of specific cultural anxieties relating to the popular and problematic use of corpse medicine, or mumia. I begin by exploring how Shakespeare represents corpses throughout Hamlet in ways which reference food and culinary practices. By doing so, Shakespeare not only emphasises the tragic objectification of the dead, but also links life and death inextricably to figurative and literal consumption. The essay proceeds to analyse the cannibalistic allusions in ‘Hamlet’ through the lens of the contemporary medical consumption of corpse medicine. While the use of corpse medicine was semantically distinguished from anthropophagy in early modern Europe, I argue that Shakespeare’s depiction of man-eating in Hamlet forces his audience to confront their own unsavoury distinctions between ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ forms of cannibalism. Viewed through the lens of cannibal discourse, Hamlet’s language over the course of the tragedy takes on new significance as the prince displays profane hunger that seems to simultaneously repel him and imbue him with a macabre vitality. Something is indeed ‘rotten in the state of Denmark’ (1.4.67), Shakespeare suggests, and the smell appears to be coming from the kitchen.

Dark tourism, which deploys taboo subjects and commercially exploits the macabre, has always raised moral conflicts at a collective and individual level while providing new spaces in which morality is communicated, reconfigured and revitalized. Although earlier studies in dark tourism have focused upon the collective notions of morality with a considerable amount of discussion on the comprehension and the manner in which the history and information of dark tourist attractions are presented for tourist consumption, the individual differences of tourist morality and how tourists morally engage with death and its various forms of representation, has been neglected. In order to understand morally transgressive behavior displayed by tourists at emotionally sensitive or controversial sites and the various ways they justify their actions, the narratives of international tourists who are interested in death-related rituals at a cremation ground in India were collected and analyzed. Drawing upon a socio-cognitive theory, the moral mechanisms involved in tourist judgment towards photography of death-related rituals are discussed. It was observed that the cremation ground offers a liminal space for tourists to exercise their moral agency in an inhibitive form, as well as proactive form and that transgressive behavior among tourists is likely if they disengage from processes related to moral conduct using various moral disengagement mechanisms. This behavior arises due to an obscuring and fragmentation of human agency during moral disengagement thereby making it possible for tourists to not take ownership of the consequences of their actions.

The Chase family vault (Oistins, Barbados) is widely known as the setting of a macabre nineteenth-century story of moving coffins. On several occasions between 1812 and 1821, on opening the sealed ...

The works of Ian McEwan are mostly related to violence and ethics, which once brought him the nickname Ian Macabre. Atonement is the ninth work of McEwan. It unfolds through Briony’s sin and atonement. This paper is a brief review of Briony in different periods in the Atonement from the perspective of Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalysis. It aims to interpret Briony’s image from Freud’s Ego, Id and Superego. To provide reader a new understanding of this novel.

The three collections of tragic stories of Jean-Pierre Camus, L’Amphitheâtre sanglant, Les Spectacles d’horreur and Les Rencontres funestes, were already the object of several studies which insist most of the time on the dissuasive role of the terrible scenes represented in the eyes of the reader with a particular sense of macabre detail. Our purpose in this article is to nuance this summary approach by taking into account his conception of the passions explained in the Traitte des passions de l’âme and the Traite de la Reformation interieure. It seems in the light of these works that the intention of Camus in his stories is not simply to illustrate the idea that nothing escapes the vigilance of the Providential Justice and that God punishes inevitably all delinquents. Certainly Camus tries to terrify to improve, but also incites to think. Indeed the Providentialism of the bishop of Belley gives an important place to a rational conception of Justice, because it invites the readers to understand the criminal behaviours in relationship to passionate mechanisms causing their fatal development. This particular representation of the crime, that also focuses on the psychological issues, is rich with many repercussions on the narrative structure, rhetoric and morality of his tragic stories.

In 1701 Puritan minister John Rogers published the criminal narrative of Esther Rodgers, who had been convicted of infanticide and executed. Esther Rodgers appears in Rogers’s Death the Certain Wages of Sin not as a depraved criminal or even a repentant sinner but as a courageous Christian martyr. Much of the productive recent scholarship on Rodgers studies the way her criminal status operated in the public sphere generally or print culture specifically, but the literary construction of her legal criminal status reveals a larger negotiation over marginalized individuals’ ability to consent and dissent in early New England and an unexpected orientation toward choice in early American literature. Rogers and his contemporaries engaged the conventions of the early modern criminal narrative to organize the chaos of maternal tragedy according to fictions of choice and the conventions of ancient and antique scripture to recast execution as a prelude to salvation. But in the ill-fitting spaces between the criminal’s story and the forms to which these authors suited it, readers could see a character who was something more—or less—than murderer or martyr: a sympathetic victim granted the ability to consent only in order to certify her legal culpability, religious conversion, and complicity in the macabre spectacle of her own public execution.

The Beresford Monument from the Church of St Edmund at Fenny Bentley in Derbyshire is a funerary monument that has received relatively little attention from scholars due to its unusual imagery and the lack of documentary evidence regarding its creation. The alabaster monument depicts Thomas Beresford (d. 1473) and Agnes Hassall (d. 1467) as fully shrouded three-dimensional effigies. Incised around the base of the monument are enshrouded representations of their twenty-one children. This paper analyzes the impact that veiling the bodies of Thomas Beresford and Agnes Hassall has on the effectiveness of the monument as a commemorative tool and situates the shrouded effigies within their broader visual and social context at the turn of the sixteenth century. Rather than dismiss the unusual imagery of the Beresford Monument as an expedient solution selected by sculptors who did not know what Thomas Beresford and Agnes Hassall actually looked like, this paper argues that shrouding the effigies was a deliberate commemorative strategy meant to evoke specific responses in the monument’s viewers. Although there is little concrete information about the tomb’s commission, contextualizing it by examining the monument in concert with other aspects of late medieval culture—including purgatorial piety, macabre texts and imagery, and ex votos—can provide a richer understanding of the object’s potentiality for its beholders. The anonymizing aspect of the shroud ultimately enabled viewers to identify freely and easily with the individuals depicted on the monument, which would have encouraged them to pray for the souls of Thomas and Agnes, thus perpetuating their memories and reducing their time in purgatory.

In 1958 Marcel Duchamp and a friend gained access to the modernist poet Mina Loy's apartment on stanton street near the Bowery in New York, so that they could display the art she was storing there in a one-woman show of her assemblage artwork (Burke, Becoming 433–34). The show, which Loy herself couldn't attend since she was unwell and living with family in Aspen, Colorado, was known as the Bodley Gallery Exhibition and generated considerable interest, even drawing the increasingly reclusive Djuna Barnes to its lively opening (434). The show was described by Stuart Preston in a New York Times review as a boxing match between the popular art of the time and “Mina Loy's shocking and macabre big collages, composed most graphically of refuse, and inspired by scenes near the Bowery” (qtd. in Burke, Becoming 434). Loy's dadaist assemblages, Preston's review made clear, were a formidable opponent not only of mainstream art but also of the larger politics of art at the time: the “alliance” they reflected “between Dada and social comment,” he wrote, was “downright sinister,” and they contained a slightly apocalyptic undercurrent of social critique. Loy's artwork incorporated discarded objects, such as bottles and pieces of cardboard, from New York City's liminal spaces—especially the Bowery's alleys and abandoned buildings, places where the homeless and unemployed gathered in desperate conditions. Transporting the gutter to the gallery, this body of work depended on her close relationship to the city's so-called refuse, the homeless people she befriended who helped her collect the objects she recycled as art. It has been almost impossible to know what Loy's body of assemblage artwork—carefully dusted off and hung up by Duchamp—looked like at the Bodley Gallery show. But one fellow Bowery artist, the American photographer Berenice Abbott, had photographed Loy's assemblages. Abbott and Loy had been friends since the 1920s, when they frequented the same art scene in Paris, where Abbott was Man Ray's assistant. Abbott photographed Loy's children, and the two artists are pictured together, along with Tristan Tzara, Jane Heap, and Margaret Anderson, in a famous photograph taken at a party in Constantin Brancusi's studio in 1920.1 In this image, Loy and Abbott fill the center of the frame; Abbott's eyes confront the camera, as if to say, “I know what you're up to,” her confident head emerging over Loy's right shoulder—Loy looking as ethereal as she does glamorous. Their friendship picked up again in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, where it was defined by Abbott's interest in Loy's success and well-being.

Romanticism, initiated in eighteenth-century Europe, had, among other characteristics, the overestimation of emotions and the elaboration of a social critique based on pre-defined customs and values. In America, Romanticism established itself, primarily, in the United States, where Edgar Allan Poe was one of its main figures, whose pessimist and macabre works were translated by Baudelaire; and, afterwards, in Brazil, the need to build a literature that had its own nationality, even if still under the influence of the French molds. Therefore, the translations of Poe’s tales made by Baudelaire came to Brazil and served as inspiration for many established authors. By observing concomitant aspects in the prose of both Poe and Álvares de Azevedo, whose work Noite na Taverna (1997) is regarded as one of the first pieces of fantastic literature in Brazil, our article aims to verify the possible influence of the American author on the work of Azevedo, using the studies held by Alfredo Bosi, Antônio Candido, Todorov and Roas, as well as consolidated literary reviews on Edgar A. Poe. Keywords: Edgar Allan Poe. Álvares de Azevedo. Romanticism. Noite na Taverna.