The aim of Le Sublime et le grotesque is to pinpoint those moments in literary and artistic history when grotesque horror turns into sublime terror, when sublime rapture is spurred by grotesque grimaces. Such investigation spans broadly from Sophocles and Pseudo-Longinus to Amélie Nothomb, and Slavoj Žižek. It involves major authors from French, English and German literary history: Montaigne and Shakespeare, Molière and Racine, Diderot and Kant, Hoffmann and Baudelaire, Schlegel and Hugo, Flaubert and Céline… It leads the reader beyond the beautiful, to a place where formal harmonies are distorted and the unity of meaning is dissolved. Such aesthetic extremes are often seen as terms of an alternative: we laugh at grotesque monstrosities or stand in awe in front of sublime grandeur. But what happens when these extremes meet? Answers to this question are provided in this volume by Baldine Saint Girons, Michel Magnien, Christian Biet, Michel Jeanneret, Richard Goodkin, Anne Vila, Hans Adler, Dominique Peyrache-Leborgne, Florence Vatan, and Jan Miernowski.