Daisy Black
Search for other papers by Daisy Black in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed Close
Grave new world
Fantasies of supersession and explosive questions in the York and Chester Flood plays
in Play time
Chapter DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526146878.00009
Online Publication Date:
17 Nov 2020
Abstract only
Log-in for full text

This chapter argues that the dramatisation of the Flood in the York and Chester plays complicates questions of supersession and typology further by demonstrating that the conflict between Noah and his wife lies in their opposing conceptions of time. Engaging with medieval theories concerning annihilation and renewal as well as more recent works on temporal collapse and explosiveness, it finds that, while Noah adheres to a supersessionary understanding of the Flood which demands a full erasure of the past in order to begin the world anew, his wife engages with models that command the explosive ability to recall the past into the present. Tracking the history of the rebellious wife figure to its earliest versions in European manuscript illumination as well as in Jewish and Muslim folklore, this chapter argues that, when placed on the medieval pageant, the disobedience legend moves beyond its frequent assignment within the problematic medieval trope of the ‘unruly woman’. Where Noah seeks to re-assert distance between past and present, Noah’s wife and her gossips collapse times into simultaneity.
  • Collapse
  • Expand

All of MUP's digital content including Open Access books and journals is now available on manchesterhive.

 

Play time

Gender, anti-Semitism and temporality in medieval biblical drama

eISBN:
9781526146878
Publisher:
Manchester University Press
Cover Play time
Subjects:
Literature and Theatre
Keywords:
medieval; gender; time; Jew; drama,; Christian; performance; spectatorship
Page Count:
247
Publisher:
Manchester University Press

Series: Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture

Metrics

All Time Past Year Past 30 Days
Abstract Views 262 76 34
Full Text Views 15 5 0
PDF Downloads 18 7 0
Cover Hartly House, Calcutta

Hartly House, Calcutta

Phebe Gibbes

Book

Publication History:

Online Publication Date:
13 Feb 2019
Subjects:
  1. Literature and Theatre
Available In:
Redeem Token

This novel is a designedly political document. Written at the time of the Hastings impeachment and set in the period of Hastings’s Orientalist government, Hartly House, Calcutta (1789) represents a dramatic delineation of the Anglo-Indian encounter. The novel constitutes a significant intervention in the contemporary debate concerning the nature of Hastings’s rule of India by demonstrating that it was characterised by an atmosphere of intellectual sympathy and racial tolerance. Within a few decades the Evangelical and Anglicising lobbies frequently condemned Brahmans as devious beneficiaries of a parasitic priestcraft, but Phebe Gibbes’s portrayal of Sophia’s Brahman and the religion he espouses represent a perception of India dignified by a sympathetic and tolerant attempt to dispel prejudice.
Cover Crossing borders and queering citizenship

Crossing borders and queering citizenship

Civic reading practice in contemporary American and Canadian writing

Author:
Zalfa Feghali

Book

Publication History:

Online Publication Date:
16 Apr 2019
Subjects:
  1. Literature and Theatre
Available In:
Redeem Token

Can reading make us better citizens? This book sheds light on how the act of reading can be mobilised as a powerful civic tool in service of contemporary civil and political struggles for minority recognition, rights, and representation in North America. Crossing borders and queering citizenship reimagines the contours of contemporary citizenship by connecting queer and citizenship theories to the idea of an engaged reading subject. This book offers a new approach to studying the act of reading, theorises reading as an integral element of the basic unit of the state: the citizen. By theorising the act of reading across borders as a civic act that queers citizenship, the book advances an alternative model of belonging through civic readerly engagement. Exploring work by seven US, Mexican, Canadian, and Indigenous authors, including Gloria Anzaldúa, Dorothy Allison, Gregory Scofield, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Erín Moure, Junot Díaz, and Yann Martel, the book offers sensitive interpretations of how reading can create citizenship practices that foreground and value recognition, rights, and representation for all members of a political system.
Cover Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson

Author:
David Brauner

Book

Publication History:

Online Publication Date:
12 Jan 2021
Subjects:
  1. Literature and Theatre
Available In:
Redeem Token

This is a comprehensive and definitive study of the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson. It offers lucid, detailed and nuanced readings of each of Jacobson’s novels, and makes a powerful case for the importance of his work in the landscape of contemporary fiction. Focusing on the themes of comedy, masculinity and Jewishness, the book emphasises the richness and diversity of Jacobson’s work. Often described by others as ‘the English Philip Roth’ and by himself as ‘the Jewish Jane Austen’, Jacobson emerges here as a complex and often contradictory figure: a fearless novelist; a combative public intellectual; a polemical journalist; an unapologetic elitist and an irreverent outsider; an exuberant iconoclast and a sombre satirist. Never afraid of controversy, Jacobson tends to polarise readers; but, love him or hate him, he is difficult to ignore. This book gives him the thorough consideration and the balanced evaluation that he deserves.