SOURCE: Schwarz, Martin. “Two Practitioners of the Grotesque: Sherwood Anderson and Isaac Bashevis Singer.” In The Shape of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Seventh International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, edited by Olena H. Saciuk, pp. 149-54. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Schwarz formulates a definition of the grotesque in literature through a comparison of the short stories of Singer and Sherwood Anderson.

From the Renaissance on, when the term grotesque was used to designate an ornamental style that had come down from antiquity, the word has undergone many variations. So numerous in fact are the definitions of the word in the realm of literature that it became necessary for some critics to define the word within the context of the particular era with which they were dealing, and even as it applied to a specific author. Few would argue that the...