The grotesque is considered to be an ancient European phenomenon. This thesis argues instead that the grotesque is in fact a world-cultural form that emerges specifically with capitalist modernity. It thus contends that the grotesque should be understood principally as the world-grotesque, a situated response to times of escalating socio-ecological crisis under capitalism.

Drawing on a world-systemic and world-ecological framework, this thesis adopts the hyphenated “world-” prefix to modify the grotesque in order to understand its forms in literature as part of a broader literary historiography that is attentive to the history of the capitalist world-system. By employing a world-literary methodology, this thesis likewise approaches transregional literary production as literature produced within the worldsystem, registering, from the regional vantage of its production, the local effects of world-historical processes. In so doing, this thesis wrests the grotesque from its ostensibly distinctly European origins, and instead understands it as a world-cultural form that does not simply telescope outwards from Europe. Rather, it emerges on the so-called frontiers of appropriation everywhere in the capitalist world-system in situated ways. The aim of the thesis is therefore to re-theorize the grotesque so that it is not simply an endlessly hybridized form, but one that can account for the multiscalar nature of the uneven capitalist world-system.

The thesis traces world-grotesque forms and tropes across a wide range of contemporary fiction, each of which responds to a specific moment of frontier exhaustion. It finds that the world-grotesque emerges to negotiate the imposition of the logic of capitalist modernity on pre-existing ways of life. In order to do this, the world-grotesque reactivates pre-modern or folkcultural forms and puts them to new ends within the current moment. In this sense, the world-grotesque does not only register the crisis in the capitalist world-system as such, but also has the potential to reveal alternative lifeways and social organizations that run parallel to the logic of capital.