The essays gathered in this volume explore the difficulties of classifying and conceptualizing the extreme and the excessive. Uniting a broad selection of new research (initially presented as part of the University of Salford’s annual College of Arts and Social Sciences Conference 2011), the collection queries some of the premises surrounding these topics: ideas that are most often presented as a counterpoint to a perceived ‘normality’.
Both terrorism/responses to terrorist threat and the grotesque within horror cinema are represented whilst perhaps reflecting that which is deemed outside of the general parameters of acceptability and decency. Yet there is also a focus on subjects that may, at first, be seen as less radical. From alternative representations of authorship to new technology’s attempts at ‘realness’, prose as hysteria through to melodramatic depictions of war and, finally, approaches that aim to challenge the more commonplace critical strategies employed in the assessment of both fine art and fine artists, this collection will be of particular interest to students and scholars prepared to look beyond a concept that may hint at the merely shocking and engage with a more widely interpreted and nuanced critique of extremity and excess
