All Beauty Must die': The Aesthetics of Murder, From Thomas de Quincey to Nick Cave‪.‬

Nick Cave's Murder Ballads album, possibly the most controversial piece of work in his oeuvre, is rarely (if ever) considered as a serious artistic work which significantly engages with any literary or aesthetic tradition. With the intention of redressing this erroneous perception, this paper develops a comparison between Cave's album and a series of essays ('On murder, considered as one of the fine arts') by the Romantic author Thomas De Quincey. De Quincey's essays are used to position Cave's ballads in their historical and intellectual context, taking into consideration the links (in relation to the sublime and the aesthetics of murder) between Romanticism and contemporary culture. **********