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.

Sara Crangle is a Lecturer at the University of Sussex, UK,
and the author of Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowing, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation (Edinburgh UP).
Peter Nicholls is Professor of English at New York University, USA. His books include George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism (OUP 2007), Modernisms: A Literary Guide (2nd ed., Palgrave Macmillan 2009) and Politics, Economics and Writing (Macmillan 1984).