Feminist Medievalisms

Embodiment and Vulnerability in Literature and Film
Erscheinungsjahr 2024
ISBN: 978-1-64189-383-1
Verlag: Amsterdam University Press

Buch, Englisch, 142 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Reihe: Arc Medievalist

This book examines feminist textual and cinematic engagements with the idea of the Middle Ages in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, arguing that the idea of the medieval past is central to the work of novelists and directors interested in embodiment and vulnerability. Careful and illuminating analysis of particular moments in fiction, film, and political discourse dismantles the false binary between popular and intellectual medievalisms, which rests on gendered understandings of genre and audience, while demonstrating that masculinist or patriarchal medievalisms have an equal but understudied counterpart.

The book's first three chapters cover Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and its afterlives, the final works of Virginia Woolf, and late twentieth-century film and music videos from the United States. The final chapter examines the treatment of women's bodies and vulnerability in both political theory and recent electoral politics, arguing that they share a common thread of misogyny rooted in the idea of the medieval past, and that one way to challenge that misogyny is by looking at complex feminist engagements with that same past, both real and imagined.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Vishnuvajjala, Usha

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein Feminismus, Feministische Theorie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Prosa, Erzählung, Roman, Prosaautoren

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter One: Nested Medievalisms and Affected Bodies in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey

Chapter Two: Feminism and Medievalism in Woolf’s Final Works

Chapter Three: Medievalism as Feminist Sanctuary in the late Twentieth Century

Chapter Four: Chaucer, Vulnerable Bodies, Somatophobia, and Theory

Select Bibliography/Further Reading

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Vishnuvajjala, Usha
Usha Vishnuvajjala is an Assistant Professor of English at SUNY–New Paltz. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and edited collections and she recently co-edited the volume Women’s Friendship in Medieval Literature (2022) with Karma Lochrie