Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. [Vol. 3.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 23)

STUDIES - Gabriella Varró: The Theme of Comic Love in Blackface Minstrelsy: The Anatomy of the Grotesque

grotesque evolving with the literature of the gothic accentuating the horrific and the demonic as opposed to the lightly humorous, was again a tendency later reinvoked in certain motifs of the minstrel genre. And thus this sketchy (and apparently incomplete) account of the historical development of the literary grotesque takes us to the America of the early 19th century, where the blackface minstrel established, invented or reinvented yet another distinct branch of the grotesque, the so-called minstrel grotesque. Before attempting a tentative working definition of the minstrel grotesque, however, certain conceptual or theoretical questions need to be addressed. As can be seen in the above historical survey of the literary grotesque, the term has been applied through the centuries to denote rather varied aspects of literary creation: essentially an aesthetic quality signifying external as well as inner properties of the art work projected (applicable to character, theme, structure, content, idea, motif, or tone alike); yet, it was also linked with a variety of literary forms and styles, techniques as well as modes of representation. With the rise of modern and postmodern literary theory, critics have begun to look upon the grotesque not exclusively as an aesthetic quality and artistic method of representation, but as an ideology, concept or structure that penetrates the author's mind, and brings about psychological dualities in the artist's mind and work (see Schlegel, Jean Paul). Theorists of the reader-response school, on the other hand, applied the grotesque to generate theories about simultaneous controversial responses to literary texts. Thus, grotesque as an aesthetic principle, a conceptual framework and an essential structural idea have by now penetrated the whole terrain of the literary culture: art, artist and audience alike. Beyond the literary sphere of reference, the grotesque has also been seen as a term applicable to subliterary forms of (artistic) expression; and it has also been applied to express a world view, or a philosophy of culture and society. Therefore in the following analysis of the minstrel grotesque it is essential to distinguish at least three basic designations of the term: (a) the minstrel grotesque as a literary 91