Odd Bodies and Visible Ends in Medieval Literature

ISBN: 9781403972040

出版社: Palgrave Macmillan

出版年: 2006-11-28

页数: 208

定价: USD 80.00

装帧: Hardcover

内容简介

This study traces how medieval audiences judge bodies (as saved or damned, human or monstrous) from Doomsday visions to beauty contests. It exposes how medieval texts manipulate narrative time and its visual evidence, like marked bodies. Anxieties about time, death, and Doomsday transform bodies (magically or literally) even in romances. Employing cultural and formalist approaches, this study breaks new ground on the historical obsession about ends and changes, reflected in different genres spanning several hundred years. It lays crucial foundations for the study of bodies--judged by deformity, gender, and other viewed perspectives--in medieval narrative and beyond.