Monster marks: sliding significations of the groteque in popular fiction

[Extract] My thinking about the grotesque first evoked a blurry but distinctly mediaeval image: gargoyles posted outside a cathedral, imps hidden under the misericord, or support for kneeling, inside. This occludes the term's history, which begins with Vitruvius' condemnation of hybrid human, animal and vegetable forms in early imperial Roman frescoes. Named "grotesque" after their rediscovery in the fifteenth-century excavations of Nero's Golden House, they were adapted by Rafael's school of painting, scorned by Neo-classicism and re-valorized by Victor Hugo in the Romantic period before being subjected to the tender mercies of psychoanalysts in Freud's wake. The inside/outside pattern of the gargoyles and imps, however, led me straight to more recent theorisations of the grotesque as a signifier in class struggle, beginning with Bakhtin