Queering Medieval Genres

Queering Medieval Genres
Author: Tison Pugh
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2004-09-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781403964328

Winner of the University of Central Florida College of Arts and Humanities Distinguished Researcher Award!!! Queering Medieval Genres proposes that, within the historical trajectory of many genres, certain agents are privileged while others are marginalized due to their understanding of heteronormative social codes. Examining the ways in which homosexuality disrupts generic and cultural expectations of heteronormativity, this book demonstrates that the introduction of the queer within medieval literature shatters the audience's expectations of textual pleasure and demands that they reconsider the effects of homosexuality on their constructions of sexual and spiritual identity. Scholars of medieval literature will appreciate the fresh insights that queer genre theory provides on critical texts of the period; additionally, Queering Medieval Genres outlines a hermeneutic device with which to analyze literature of other historical periods as well.

Queering the Middle Ages

Queering the Middle Ages
Author: Glenn Burger
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2001
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780816634040

The essays in this volume present new work that, in one way or another, "queers" stabilized conceptions of the Middle Ages, allowing us to see the period and its systems of sexuality in radically different, off-center, and revealing ways. While not denying the force of gender and sexual norms, the authors consider how historical work has written out or over what might have been non-normative in medieval sex and culture, and they work to restore a sense of such instabilities. At the same time, they ask how this pursuit might allow us not only to re-envision medieval studies but also to rethink how we study culture from our current set of vantage points within postmodernity. The authors focus on particular medieval moments: Christine de Pizan's representation of female sexuality; chastity in the Grail romances; the illustration of "the sodomite" in manuscript commentaries on Dante's Commedia; the complex ways that sexuality inflected English national politics at the time of Edward II's deposition; the construction of the sodomitic Moor by Reconquista Spain. Throughout, their work seeks to disturb a logic that sees the past as significant only insofar as it may make sense for and of a stabilized present.

Queering the Text

Queering the Text
Author: Andrew Ramer
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2020-03-24
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1532665121

Ramer plays and grapples with traditional midrashim, drawing inspiration from the homoerotic love poems of medieval Spain, and envisioning alternate versions of the present. Inspired by the pioneering work of Jewish feminists, he has crafted stories that anchor LGBT lives in the 3,000-year-old history of the Jewish people.

Queer Love in the Middle Ages

Queer Love in the Middle Ages
Author: Anna Klosowska Roberts
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2016-05-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137088109

Queer Love in the Middle Ages points out queer themes in the works of the French canon, including Perceval , the Romance of the Rose and the Roman d'Eneas . It brings out less known works that prominently feature same-sex themes: Yde and Olive , a romance with a cross-dressed heroine who marries a princess; and many others. The book combines an interest in contemporary French theory (Kristeva, Barthes, psychoanalysis) with a close reading of medieval texts. It discusses important recent publications in pre-modern queer studies in the US. It is the first major contribution to queer studies in medieval French literature.

Medieval Futurity

Medieval Futurity
Author: Will Rogers
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2020-11-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501513974

This collection of essays asks contributors to take the capaciousness of the word "queer" to heart in order to think about what medieval queers would have looked like and how they may have existed on the margins and borders of dominant, normative sexuality and desire. The contributors work with recent trends in queer medieval studies, blending together modern concepts of sexuality and desire with the queer configurations of eroticism, desire, and materiality as they might have existed for medieval audiences.

Courtly and Queer

Courtly and Queer
Author: Charlie Samuelson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2022-03-24
Genre:
ISBN: 9780814214985

Recasts queerness in medieval French romances by juxtaposing key genres for the first time, revealing how their literary sophistication overlaps with modern conceptions of queerness.

My Gay Middle Ages

My Gay Middle Ages
Author: A. W. Strouse
Publisher: punctum books
Total Pages: 87
Release: 2015-05-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0615830005

In the world of My Gay Middle Ages, Chaucer and Boethius are the secret-sharers of A.W. Strouse's "gay lifestyle." Where many scholars of the Middle Ages would "get in from behind" on cultural history, Strouse instead does a "reach around." He eschews academic "queer theory" as yet another tedious, normative framework, and writes in the long, fruity tradition of irresponsible, homo-medievalism (a lineage that includes luminaries like Oscar Wilde, who was sustained by his amateur readings of Dante and Abelard during the darks days of his incarceration for crimes of "gross indecency"). Strouse experiences medieval literature and philosophy as a part of his everyday life, and in these prose poems he makes the case for regarding the Middle Ages as a kind of technology of self-preservation, a posture through which to spiritualize the petty indignities of modern urban life. With a Warholian flair for insouciant name-dropping and a Steinian appetite for syntactic perversion, Strouse monumentalizes the medieval within the contemporary and the contemporary within the medieval. "Today, almost nobody reads Boethius, which if you ask me is a crying shame. Because Boethius is so gay. First of all, the heroine of the Consolation is this great big fierce diva, whose name is Lady Philosophy. She's a Lady, and she doesn't stand for anybody's crap. At the beginning of the book, Boethius is crying, all alone in prison, depressed that he's lonely and loveless and is going to be killed. Lady Philosophy descends from the heavens, a la Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz. The first thing Boethius notices about her is that she's wearing an amazing dress with Greek letters embroidered on it-they stand for practical and theoretical philosophy. Her dress has been torn to shreds by the hands of uncouth philosophers. They didn't know how to treat a lady." (from "My Boethius") TABLE OF CONTENTS // The Most Famous Medievalist in the World - My Boethius - Memory Houses - The President of the Medieval Academy Made Me Cry - My Medieval Romance - The Formation of a Persecuting Society - The Medieval Heart is Like a Penis - Jilted Again - My Orpheus - Medieval Literacy - My Cloud of Unknowing - The Post-Medieval Unconscious - Coda: The Dedication"

Postmodern Poetry and Queer Medievalisms: Time Mechanics

Postmodern Poetry and Queer Medievalisms: Time Mechanics
Author: David Hadbawnik
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2022-06-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501511238

This volume builds on recent scholarship on contemporary poetry in relation to medieval literature, focusing on postmodern poets who work with the medieval in a variety of ways. Such recent projects invert or “queer” the usual transactional nature of engagements with older forms of literature, in which readers are asked to exchange some small measure of bewilderment at archaic language or forms for a sense of having experienced a medieval text. The poets under consideration in this volume demand that readers grapple with the ways in which we are still “medieval” – in other words, the ways in which the questions posed by their medieval source material still reverberate and hold relevance for today’s world. They do so by challenging the primacy of present over past, toppling the categories of old and new, and suggesting new interpretive frameworks for contemporary and medieval poetry alike.

Queer Chivalry

Queer Chivalry
Author: Tison Pugh
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2013-12-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0807151866

For the U.S. South, the myth of chivalric masculinity dominates the cultural and historical landscape. Visions of white southern men as archetypes of honor and gentility run throughout regional narratives with little regard for the actions and, at times, the atrocities committed by such men. In Queer Chivalry, Tison Pugh exposes the inherent contradictions in these depictions of cavalier manhood, investigating the foundations of southern gallantry as a reincarnated and reauthorized version of medieval masculinity. Pugh argues that the idea of masculinity -- particularly as seen in works by prominent southern authors from Mark Twain to Ellen Gilchrist -- constitutes a cultural myth that queerly demarcates accepted norms of manliness, often by displaying the impossibility of its achievement. Beginning with Twain's famous critique of "the Sir Walter disease" that pilloried the South, Pugh focuses on authors who questioned the code of chivalry by creating protagonists whose quests for personal knighthood prove quixotic. Through detailed readings of major works -- including Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Flannery O'Connor's short fiction, John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, Robert Penn Warren's A Place to Come To, Walker Percy's novels, and Gilchrist's The Annunciation -- Pugh demonstrates that the hypermasculinity of white-knight ideals only draws attention to the ambiguous gender of the literary southern male. Employing insights from gender and psychoanalytic theory, Queer Chivalry contributes to recent critical discussions of the cloaked anxieties about gender and sexuality in southern literature. Ultimately, Pugh uncovers queer limits in the cavalier mythos, showing how facts and fictions contributed to the ideological formulation of the South.