Indecent Exposure: Gender, Politics, and Obscene Comedy in Middle English Literature

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University of Pennsylvania Press, 22 апр. 2016 г. - Всего страниц: 303

Men and women struggling for control of marriage and sexuality; narratives that focus on trickery, theft, and adultery; descriptions of sexual activities and body parts, the mention of which is prohibited in polite society: such are the elements that constitute what Nicole Nolan Sidhu calls a medieval discourse of obscene comedy, in which a particular way of thinking about men, women, and household organization crosses genres, forms, and languages. Inviting its audiences to laugh at violations of what is good, decent, and seemly, obscene comedy manifests a semiotic instability that at once supports established hierarchies and delights in overturning them.

In Indecent Exposure, Sidhu explores the varied functions of obscene comedy in the literary and visual culture of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England. In chapters that examine Chaucer's Reeve's Tale and Legend of Good Women; Langland's Piers Plowman; Lydgate's Mumming at Hertford, Troy Book, and Fall of Princes; the Book of Margery Kempe, the Wakefield "Second Shepherds' Play"; the Towneley "Noah"; and other works of drama, Sidhu proposes that Middle English writers use obscene comedy in predictable and unpredictable contexts to grapple with the disturbances that English society experienced in the century and a half following the Black Death. For Sidhu, obscene comedy emerges as a discourse through which writers could address not only issues of gender, sexuality, and marriage but also concerns as varied as the conflicts between Christian doctrine and lived experience, the exercise of free will, the social consequences of violence, and the nature of good government.

 

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Indecent Exposure: Gender, Politics, and Obscene Comedy in Middle English ...
Nicole Nolan Sidhu
Ограниченный просмотр - 2016

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argues Ariadne aristocratic asserts audience behavior biblical drama Book of Margery Book’s Catherine of Valois characterized Chaucer Christian Christine de Pisan Church cited clerics clerks comic courtly criticism critique Dame discourse dominant early modern elites fabliau Fall of Princes farces female feminist fifteenth century figures fourteenth French gender genre heresy household humor husband Ibid Innocents pageants interrogate John John Lydgate king Knight Knight's Tale Langland Late Medieval Latin Legend Lollard Lydgate Lydgate's Malyne manuscript Margery Kempe Margery’s marriage masculine medieval culture medieval obscenity Middle English middle-rank Miller's Tale Misericords misogynist misogyny Mumming at Hertford narrative narrator Noah pageants notes notion obscene comedy Oxford passage Passus Piers Plowman plays poem political Pornography rank rape Reeve’s Reeve's Tale remarks resistance sexual social society status Symkyn Thebaid Theseus third vision tion trials segment trope Troy Book unruly woman uxor violence wife wives women writing Ymaginatif York

Об авторе (2016)

Nicole Nolan Sidhu is Associate Professor of English at East Carolina University.

Библиографические данные

НазваниеIndecent Exposure: Gender, Politics, and Obscene Comedy in Middle English Literature
The Middle Ages Series, ISSN 2690-7682
АвторNicole Nolan Sidhu
Издание:иллюстрированное
ИздательUniversity of Pennsylvania Press, 2016
ISBN081224804X, 9780812248043
Количество страницВсего страниц: 303
  
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