Monsters Gender And Sexuality In Medieval English Literature
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Author | : Dana Oswald |
Publisher | : Boydell & Brewer |
Total Pages | : 245 |
Release | : 2010 |
Genre | : Literary Criticism |
ISBN | : 1843842327 |
A gendered reading of monster and the monstrous body in medieval literature. Monsters abound in Old and Middle English literature, from Grendel and his mother in Beowulf to those found in medieval romances such as Sir Gowther. Through a close examination of the way in which their bodies are sexed and gendered, and drawing from postmodern theories of gender, identity, and subjectivity, this book interrogates medieval notions of the body and the boundaries of human identity. Case studies of Wonders of the East, Beowulf, Mandeville's Travels, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, and Sir Gowther reveal a shift in attitudes toward the gendered and sexed body, and thus toward identity, between the two periods: while Old English authors and artists respond to the threat of the gendered, monstrous form by erasing it, Middle English writers allow transgressive and monstrous bodies to transform and therefore integrate into society. This metamorphosis enables redemption for some monsters, while other monstrous bodies become dangerously flexible and invisible, threatening the communities they infiltrate. These changing cultural reactions to monstrous bodies demonstrate the precarious relationship between body and identity in medieval literature. DANA M. OSWALD is Assistant Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Parkside.
Author | : Michael E. Heyes |
Publisher | : Routledge |
Total Pages | : 234 |
Release | : 2019-12-06 |
Genre | : History |
ISBN | : 0429588607 |
St. Margaret of Antioch was one of the most popular saints in medieval England and, throughout the Middle Ages, the various Lives of St. Margaret functioned as a blueprint for a virginal life and supernatural assistance to pregnant women during the dangerous process of labor. In her narrative, Margaret is accosted by various demons and, having defeated each monster in turn, she is taken to the place of her martyrdom where she prays for supernatural boons for her adherents. This book argues that Margaret’s monsters are a key element in understanding Margaret’s importance to her adherents, specifically how the sexual identities of her adherents were constructed and maintained. More broadly, this study offers three major contributions to the field of medieval studies: first, it argues for the utility of a diachronic analysis of Saints’ Lives literature in a field dominated by synchronic analyses; second, this diachronic analysis is important to interpreting the intertext of Saints’ Lives, not only between different Lives but also different versions of the same Life; and third, the approach further suggests that the most valuable socio-cultural information in hagiographic literature is found in the auxiliary characters and not in the figure of the saint him/herself.
Author | : Jeffrey Jerome Cohen |
Publisher | : U of Minnesota Press |
Total Pages | : 262 |
Release | : 1999 |
Genre | : Abnormalities, Human, in literature |
ISBN | : 9781452903668 |
Author | : KellyAnn Fitzpatrick |
Publisher | : Boydell & Brewer |
Total Pages | : 246 |
Release | : 2019 |
Genre | : History |
ISBN | : 1843845415 |
The medieval in the modern world is here explored in a variety of media, from film and book to gaming.
Author | : Rebecca Merkelbach |
Publisher | : Medieval Institute Publications |
Total Pages | : 258 |
Release | : 2019-10-30 |
Genre | : Literary Criticism |
ISBN | : 9781501518362 |
Dragons, giants, and the monsters of learned discourse are rarely encountered in the Sagas of Icelanders, and therefore, the general teratological focus on physical monstrosity yields only limited results when applied to them. This, however, does not equal an absence of monstrosity - it only means that monstrosity is conceived of differently. This book shifts the view of monstrosity from the physical to the social, accounting for the unique social circumstances presented in the Íslendingasögur and demonstrating how closely interwoven the social and the monstrous are in this genre. Employing literary and cultural theory as well as anthropological and historical approaches, it reads the monsters of the Íslendingasögur in their literary and socio-cultural context, demonstrating that they are not distractions from feud and conflict, but that they are in fact an intrinsic part of the genre's re-imagining of the past for the needs of the present.
Author | : Jeffrey Jerome Cohen |
Publisher | : U of Minnesota Press |
Total Pages | : 331 |
Release | : 1996-11-15 |
Genre | : Literary Criticism |
ISBN | : 1452900558 |
The contributors to Monster Theory consider beasts, demons, freaks and fiends as symbolic expressions of cultural unease that pervade a society and shape its collective behavior. Through a historical sampling of monsters, these essays argue that our fascination for the monstrous testifies to our continued desire to explore difference and prohibition.
Author | : Larissa Tracy |
Publisher | : Boydell & Brewer Ltd |
Total Pages | : 338 |
Release | : 2015 |
Genre | : Literary Criticism |
ISBN | : 1843843935 |
A new look at the way in which medieval European literature depicts torture and brutality.
Author | : Margery Kempe |
Publisher | : Penguin UK |
Total Pages | : 449 |
Release | : 1985 |
Genre | : Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | : 0140432515 |
The story of the eventful and controversial life of Margery Kempe - wife, mother, businesswoman, pilgrim and visionary - is the earliest surviving autobiography in English. Here Kempe (c.1373-c.1440) recounts in vivid, unembarrassed detail the madness that followed the birth of the first of her fourteen children, the failure of her brewery business, her dramatic call to the spiritual life, her visions and uncontrollable tears, the struggle to convert her husband to a vow of chastity and her pilgrimages to Europe and the Holy Land. Margery Kempe could not read or write, and dictated her remarkable story late in life. It remains an extraordinary record of human faith and a portrait of a medieval woman of unforgettable character and courage.
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.
Author | : Elaine Treharne |
Publisher | : OUP Oxford |
Total Pages | : 792 |
Release | : 2010-04-15 |
Genre | : Literary Criticism |
ISBN | : 0191613592 |
The study of medieval literature has experienced a revolution in the last two decades, which has reinvigorated many parts of the discipline and changed the shape of the subject in relation to the scholarship of the previous generation. 'New' texts (laws and penitentials, women's writing, drama records), innovative fields and objects of study (the history of the book, the study of space and the body, medieval masculinities), and original ways of studying them (the Sociology of the Text, performance studies) have emerged. This has brought fresh vigour and impetus to medieval studies, and impacted significantly on cognate periods and areas. The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English brings together the insights of these new fields and approaches with those of more familiar texts and methods of study, to provide a comprehensive overview of the state of medieval literature today. It also returns to first principles in posing fundamental questions about the nature, scope, and significance of the discipline, and the directions that it might take in the next decade. The Handbook contains 44 newly commissioned essays from both world-leading scholars and exciting new scholarly voices. Topics covered range from the canonical genres of Saints' lives, sermons, romance, lyric poetry, and heroic poetry; major themes including monstrosity and marginality, patronage and literary politics, manuscript studies and vernacularity are investigated; and there are close readings of key texts, such as Beowulf, Wulf and Eadwacer, and Ancrene Wisse and key authors from Ælfric to Geoffrey Chaucer, Langland, and the Gawain Poet.