Laughter and Awkwardness in Late Medieval England PDF Download

Author: DAVID. WATT
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN: 1788314301
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Author: David Watt
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350146854
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
'We live,' according to Adam Kotsko, 'in an awkward age.' While this condition may present some challenges, it may also help us to be more attuned to awkwardness in other ages. This book pairs medieval texts with twenty-first century films or television programmes to explore what the resonance between them can tell us about living together in an awkward age. In this nuanced and engaging study, David Watt focuses especially, but not exclusively, on the 15th century, which seems to intervene awkwardly in the literary trajectory between Chaucer and the Renaissance. This book's hypothesis is that the social discomfort depicted and engendered by writers as diverse as Thomas Hoccleve, Margery Kempe, and Sir Thomas Malory is a feature rather than a flaw. Laughter and Awkwardness in Late Medieval England explains that these authors have a great deal in common with other fifteenth-century authors, who generated embodied experiences of social discomfort in a range of genres by adopting and adapting literary techniques used by their predecessors and successors in slightly different ways. Like the twenty-first century texts with which they are paired, the late-medieval texts that feature in this book use the relationship between laughter and awkwardness to ask what it means to live with each other and how we can learn to live with ourselves.

Author: V. Allen
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230109063
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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This book presents waste as an aesthetic category that introduces an arsy-versy world where detritus is precious. This aesthetic is applied in the second part to etymology, poking through the 'paternal dungheaps' of words, and tracing their origins not to Eden but to Babel, puns, and word play.

Author: Sebastian Coxon
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781315092010
Category : LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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"In contrast to the vernacular literary traditions of France, Italy and England, comic tales in verse flourished in late medieval Germany, providing bawdy entertainment for larger audiences of public recitals as well as for smaller numbers of individual readers. In a sustained close analysis Sebastian Coxon explores both the narrative design and fundamental thematic preoccupations of these short texts. A distinctively performative tradition of pre-modern narrative literature emerges which invited its recipients to think, learn and above all to laugh in a number of different ways."--Provided by publisher.

Author: Jonathan Wilcox
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487545703
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Humour in Old English Literature deploys modern theories of humour to explore the style and content of surviving writing from early medieval England. The book analyses Old English riddles, wisdom literature, runic writing, the deployment of rhymes, and humour in heroic poetry, hagiography, and romance. Drawing on a fine-tuned understanding of literary technique, the book presents a revisionist view of Old English literature, partly by reclaiming often-neglected texts and partly by uncovering ironies and embarrassments within well-established works, including Beowulf. Most surprisingly, Jonathan Wilcox engages the large body of didactic literature, pinpointing humour in two anonymous homilies along with extensive use in saints’ lives. Each chapter ends by revealing a different audience that would have shared in the laughter. Wilcox suggests that the humour of Old English literature has been scantily covered in past scholarship because modern readers expect a dour and serious corpus. Humour in Old English Literature aims to break that cycle by highlighting works and moments that are as entertaining now as they were then.

Author: Louise D'Arcens
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1843843803
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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The role of laughter and humour in the postmedieval citation, interpretation or recreation of the middle ages has hitherto received little attention, a gap in scholarship which this book aims to fill. Examining a wide range of comic texts and practices across several centuries, from Don Quixote and early Chaucerian modernisation through to Victorian theatre, the Monty Python films, television and the experience of visiting sites of "heritage tourism" such as the Jorvik Viking Museum at York, it identifies what has been perceived as uniquely funny about the Middle Ages in different times and places, and how this has influenced ideas not just about the medieval but also about modernity. Tracing the development and permutations of its various registers, including satire, parody, irony, camp, wit, jokes, and farce, the author offers fresh and amusing insight into comic medievalism as a vehicle for critical commentary on the present as well as the past, and shows that for as long as there has been medievalism, people have laughed at and with the middle ages. Louise D'Arcens is Associate Professor in English Literatures at the University of Wollongong.

Author: Peter J. A. Jones
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192581627
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Towards the end of the twelfth century, powerful images of laughing kings and saints began to appear in texts circulating at the English royal court. At the same time, contemporaries began celebrating the wit, humour, and laughter of King Henry II (r.1154-89) and his martyred Archbishop of Canterbury, Saint Thomas Becket (d.1170). Taking a broad genealogical approach, Laughter and Power in the Twelfth Century traces the emergence of this powerful laughter through an immersive study of medieval intellectual, literary, social, religious, and political debates. Focusing on a cultural renaissance in England, the study situates laughter at the heart of the defining transformations of the second half of the 1100s. With an expansive survey of theological and literary texts, bringing a range of unedited manuscript material to light in the process, Peter J. A. Jones exposes how twelfth-century writers came to connect laughter with spiritual transcendence and justice, and how this connection gave humour a unique political and spiritual power in both text and action. Ultimately, Jones argues that England's popular images of laughing kings and saints effectively reinstated a sublime charismatic authority, something truly rebellious at a moment in history when bureaucracy and codification were first coming to dominate European political life.

Author: Sandra M. Hordis
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN: 9782503524276
Category : Art, Medieval
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Table of contents: Martha Bayless, 'Merriment and Entertainment in Anglo-Saxon England: What is the Evidence?'; Christopher Crane, 'Taking Laughter Seriously: The Rhetoric of Humor in Middle English Drama, Sermon Exempla and Spiritual Instruction'; Paul Hardwick, 'Making Light of Devotion: The Pilgrimage Window at York Minster'; Dana Symons, 'Comic Pleasures: Chaucer and Popular Romance'; Christian Sheridan, 'Funny Money: Puns and Currency in the Shipman's Tale'; Laurel Broughton, 'From Buttfaces to Turd Bowling: Physical Humor in the Margins'; Sandra M. Hordis, 'Gender and Dialogic Laughter in Malory's Morte Darthur'; Miriamne Ara Krummel, 'Getting Even: Uneasy Laughter in The Play of the Sacrament'; Peter G. Beidler, 'Realistic Stage Comedy in Chaucer's Miller's Tale'; Elaine C. Block, 'Fooling Apes and Aping Fools on Misericord Carvings'.

Author: John Mccormick
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587295180
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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In this fascinating and colorful book, researcher and performer John McCormick focuses on the marionette world of Victorian Britain between its heyday after 1860 and its waning years from 1895 to 1914. Situating the rich and diverse puppet theatre in the context of entertainment culture, he explores both the aesthetics of these dancing dolls and their sociocultural significance in their life and time. The history of marionette performances is interwoven with live-actor performances and with the entire gamut of annual fairs, portable and permanent theatres, music halls, magic lantern shows, waxworks, panoramas, and sideshows. McCormick has drawn upon advertisements in the Era, an entertainment paper, between the 1860s and World War I, and articles in the World’s Fair, a paper for showpeople, in the first fifty years of the twentieth century, as well as interviews with descendants of the marionette showpeople and close examinations of many of the surviving puppets. McCormick begins his study with an exploration of the Victorian marionette theatre in the context of other theatrical events of the day, with proprietors and puppeteers, and with the venues where they performed. He further examines the marionette’s position as an actor not quite human but imitating humans closely enough to be considered empathetic; the ways that physical attributes were created with wood, paint, and cloth; and the dramas and melodramas that the dolls performed. A discussion of the trick figures and specialized acts that each company possessed, as well as an exploration of the theatre’s staging, lighting, and costuming, follows in later chapters. McCormick concludes with a description of the last days of marionette theatre in the wake of changing audience expectations and the increasing popularity of moving pictures. This highly enjoyable and readable study, often illuminated by intriguing anecdotes such as that of the Armenian photographer who fell in love with and abducted the Holden company’s Cinderella marionette in 1881, will appeal to everyone fascinated by the magic of nineteenth-century theatre, many of whom will discover how much the marionette could contribute to that magic.

Author: Per Fornegard
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789174024470
Category : Emotions in art
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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