Output details

Early Modern Horror

Contribution and context: Loh's output comprises: the sole editorship of, as well as contribution of the introduction and a major essay, to the special issue of the OAJ: Early Modern Horror (Oxford University Press, 2011). It features peer-reviewed articles by 7 leading scholars, outlining a new area of study within the Early Modern field. Loh’s essay ‘Outscreaming the Laocoon’ demonstrates how a grounded history of sensation and affect is possible through examining the critical reception of the Laocoön in the weeks, decades, and centuries after its discovery. In her contribution, she argues that, contrary to Winckelmann’s anaesthetizing formula of “noble simplicity and calm grandeur,” early modern accounts—both poetic and visual—were brimming instead with accounts of screaming stones, pallid bodies, bleeding marbles, agony, pity, and horror.

Research imperatives and process: In this edited volume Loh brought together a collection of essays and herself contributed to the critical exploration of anachronism as a means to do history anew. The theme of horror touches upon ethical issues such as the representation of pain, upon cognitive debates such as the place of sensation and affect in art, and upon political concerns such as the allegorical mode of horror as a genre often linked to historical periods of war, such as our own. The radical turn in this project, however, is to look backwards in time at images and objects that have come to feel ‘safe’ through historical distance (e.g. artworks portraying religious martyrdom, paintings depicting cruelty towards women or violence towards non-European subjects, battle scenes that justify the atrocities of war, etc.) rather than focusing on the recent revival in horror cinema post-9/11. Research for the submission was undertaken during the period of Loh’s Leverhulme Prize.