Starting from an anecdote about Pablo Picasso’s fascination with faces recounted by Gertrude Stein, the Introduction argues that literary modernism revised nineteenth-century physiognomy. The Introduction posits a narrative arc that moves from Georg Simmel’s diagnosis of the centrality of the face in modernity to Mina Loy’s creative appropriation of the face through the concept of “auto-facial-construction.” Both Simmel and Loy framed the face as a form. The Introduction draws out the urgency of thinking about the face as form across a set of contemporary debates: the face as the site for the technologization of subjectivity, the face as a node of biometric surveillance, the face as a battleground for the politics of race, the face as a screen for the politics of the COVID-19 pandemic, the face as a capitalist commodity and contestations thereof.

Joseph Albernaz examines how “the modern category of lyric voice is entangled with processes of racialization.” Albernaz focuses on the complaint poem, a subgenre that was especially important to Romantic-era abolitionists, who often ventriloquized enslaved Africans. And yet, Albernaz contends, Romantic poetry, particularly as it is taken up by Black writers, is also capable of refusing the racial logics it has traditionally upheld. In such instances, complaint negates the world as it is and reveals, however briefly, “the collective undersong of No, the depthless well of non-sense from which all sense springs.”

Smiles were in short supply in the darkest days of the Covid-19 pandemic, in large part because so many were concealed beneath masks. In societies that have no modern tradition of wearing masks or veils, the unfamiliar sight of concealed faces can be disconcerting. This is not because we are unable to see the flesh of the face – a lifeless face can be quite as disconcerting as any mask – but rather because artificial face coverings conceal our arts of face making. The face is, after all, the only part of the body that we commonly talk of in terms of ‘making’ and of being ‘made up’. The very word ‘face’ derives from the Latin facere – to make or to do. This chapter considers the psychological power of face-making and the exploitation of that power in political performance. It also considers, more deeply, how physical face-making parallels rhetorical crafting of persona in politics, law, and society at large.

In Propertius 4.7, Cynthia is conceived as the character who, in her role as the beloved, can infuse a sinister sensation of the grotesque into the very concept of elegiac love, of which she is the source and the protagonist. The poet ventriloquizes her voice, superimposing her role and gender identity on his, in a strategy that enables him to transmit to the realm of his aesthetic choices her grotesque embodiment of elegy, as well as her allegation that, in charging her with infidelity, he was not truthful about her. In this poem, Propertius’ elegiac programme appears to be centrally committed to a grotesque ethos, derisive and destabilizing of the epistemological and aesthetic conventions by which the genre is presumed to be governed. As a result, the conceptual and aesthetic domains of the genre appear deeply marked by uncanny imagery, contradiction, and instability of form. The imaginative world of this elegy requires readers to shift their interpretive base continually, accepting the incongruous realm of beauty pierced by ugliness as the manifestation of a poetic congruity of a higher order. That dialectical form of congruity is the distinctive feature of the Propertian elegiac grotesque.

Propertius 4.5 is the poet–lover’s vindictive fantasy against the lena, the character who is most inimical to him in the dramatic scenario of love elegy. He expresses his hostility towards her by depicting her as a profoundly grotesque creature, wicked and revolting in every way. Propertius enables the poet–lover to be mercilessly punitive and to use images likely to generate a strong emotional reaction. The images contemplated by the poet–lover in his rage are the same ones contemplated by us, Propertius’ readers, as we move through the text. Being expressions of a rejected lover, such images are likely to generate a sequence of vehement emotions, both within the narrative and in the reading experience, while our gaze and the poet–lover’s both remain fixed on the lena as an embodied source of the dark passions that course through the poem. We would miss the genre’s signature of authenticity if we did not conclude that the grotesque is implicit in and central to the Propertian elegy.