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For the last three decades or so, literary studies, especially those dealing with premodern texts, have been dominated by the New Historicist paradigm. This book is a collection of essays explores medieval and early modern Troilus-texts from Chaucer to Shakespeare. The contributions show how medieval and early modern fictions of Troy use love and other emotions as a means of approaching the problem of tradition. The book argues that by emphasizing Troilus's and Cressida's hopes and fears, Shakespeare sets in motion a triangle of narrative, emotion and temporality. It is a spectacle of which tells something about the play but also about the relation between anticipatory emotion and temporality. The sense of multiple literary futures is shaped by Shakespeare's Chaucer, and in particular by Troilus and Criseyde. The book argues that the play's attempted violence upon a prototypical form of historical time is in part an attack on the literary narratives. Criseyde's beauty is described many times. The characters' predilection for sententiousness unfolds gradually. Through Criseyde, Chaucer's Poet displaces authorial humility as arrogance. The Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida saga begins with Boccaccio, who isolates and expands the love affair between Troiolo and Criseida to vent his sexual frustration. The poem appears to be linking an awareness of history and its continuing influence and impact on the present to hermeneutical acts conspicuously gendered female. The main late medieval Troy tradition does two things: it represents ferocious military combat, and also practises ferocious literary combat against other, competing traditions of Troy.
state’s racist policies, but by asserting that Armenians were ‘as white and as intelligent, and as easy of assimilation into the community as English boys’. 2 As the idea of a civilising mission by Christians gave way to the ‘modern humanitarianism’ of social reform and ‘making good’, women in particular used the opportunity offered by humanitarian work to move beyond domesticity and the enforced behaviours of their own society back home. Charity and philanthropic work had long been gendered female, and humanitarianism abroad provided a place for escaping the
art as that which ‘will appeal to women, especially to the very old and the very young, and also to monks and nuns…’ because it is ‘done without reason or art…without skillful choice or boldness…without substance or vigour.’ 11 In a painting, it is understood that the ground has been gendered female. Mira Schor reminds us that ‘painting in the high Italian Renaissance
In its contributions to the study of material social differences, queer theoretical writing has mostly assumed that any ideas which embody 'difference' are valuable. More than this, where it is invoked in contemporary theory, queerness is often imagined as synonymous with difference itself. This book uncovers an alternative history in queer cultural representation. Through engagement with works from a range of queer literary genres from across the long twentieth century – fin-de-siècle aestheticism, feminist speculative fiction, lesbian middle-brow writing, and the tradition of the stud file – the book elucidates a number of formal and thematic attachments to ideas that have been denigrated in queer theory for their embodiment of sameness: uselessness, normativity, reproduction and reductionism. Exploring attachments to these ideas in queer culture is also the occasion for a broader theoretical intervention: Same Old suggests, counterintuitively, that the aversion they inspire may be of a piece with how homosexuality has been denigrated in the modern West as a misguided orientation towards sameness. Combining queer cultural and literary history, sensitive close readings and detailed genealogies of theoretical concepts, Same Old encourages a fundamental rethinking of some of the defining positions in queer thought.
about women’s corporeal nature with the materiality of performance. Broadly speaking, performance methodologies claim a role for the body, for both women and men. In fifteenth-century Metz, however, female participation in the ‘matter’ of performance specifically located sanctity within living bodies that were gendered female. The Saint Catherine actor, for example, carried the saint within her and through the city for many years after her initial performance of the role. This situated the holiness of Catherine of Siena in the actor, who manifested the saint to the
which W. W. outlines, between a masculine Satan and a feminine soul, underlines his soul’s weakness at this point in his conversion experience, but also indicates that spiritual identity can be gendered female even if the convert is male. Despite the potential for gender to appear unstable in these male narratives it is not the case that any of them use the
an escape through this private world to a social world: not the world of historical circumstance or process, but of conventional and ostensibly unhistorical social relationships with friends and sisters and nature. It is a world which needs a kind of noun – such as ‘Nature’ – which is in some respects common and in some respects proper and which is gendered female. Hazlitt wrote about George Crabbe as well as Wordsworth in the 1818 Lectures on the English Poets , although not in anything like the same terms. But while subsequent critics have not taken up Hazlitt
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twentieth-century life. Books such as Claire Tylee’s The Great War and Women’s Consciousness , 4 Sharon Ouditt’s Fighting Forces, Writing Women , 5 Jenny Hartley’s Millions Like Us 6 and Gill Plain’s Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power and Resistance 7 explore gendered female responses to various wars through the medium of the
, including priestly celibacy and its concomitant childlessness. Female two-spirits eschewed marriage and, like a priest, cross-gender females did not bear children once they assumed their masculine occupations: ‘Their kin considered them nonreproductive and accepted the loss of their childbearing potential, placing a woman’s individual interests and abilities above her value as a producer.’ 56 Most significantly, the role of the female two-spirit often comprehended a spiritual element. Cross-gender females ‘were inspired by dreams or visions, had shamanic powers, or were