'The exploration of the implications of abjection: being abject, positioning as abject, for the visual and performing arts defines for this collection a double relevance. It adds to the study of abjection; it adds also to the analysis of a range of artistic practices.... most of the chapters will themselves become significant in their areas while the whole performs an enlivening re-engagement and expansion of abjection as a term in contemporary cultural analysis.'
Griselda Pollock

Rina Arya is Reader in Visual Communication at the University of Wolverhampton

Nicholas Chare is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of History of Art and Film Studies at the Université de Montréal

Introduction: Approaching abjection - Rina Arya and Nicholas Chare
1. Art, abjection and bare life - John Lechte
2. A lesbian, feminist and Canadian perspective: queering abjection - Jayne Wark
3. Manet's Abject Surrealism - Nicholas Chare
4. Juan Davila's abject after-image - Rex Butler and A. D. S. Donaldson
5. Animals, art, abjection - Barbara Creed and Jeanette Hoorn
6. The fragmented body as an index of abjection - Rina Arya
7. Skin, body, self: the question of the abject in the work of Francis Bacon - Ernst van Alphen
8. Abjection, melancholia and ambiguity in the works of Catherine Bell - Estelle Barrett
9. Corpus Delicti - Kerstin Mey
10. Art is on the way: from the abject opening of underworld to the shitty ending of oblivion - Calvin Thomas
11. Base materials: performing the abject object - Daniel Watt
Index