Comic Medievalism - Laughing at the Middle Ages

Erscheinungsjahr 2014
ISBN: 978-1-84384-380-1
Verlag: D. S. Brewer

Buch, Englisch, Band Volume 4, 219 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 241 mm, Gewicht: 536 g

Reihe: Medievalism

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

D`arcens, Louise

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: Laughing at, with, and in the Middle Ages
The Cervantean Paradigm: Comedy, Madness, and Meta-medievalism in Don Quixote
Scraping the Rust from the Joking Bard: Chaucer in the Age of Wit
Medievalist Farce as Anti-totalitarian Weapon: Dario Fo as Modern Guillare
Pre-modern Camp and Faerie Legshows: Travestying the Middle Ages on the Nineteenth-Century Stage
Up the Middle Ages: Performing Tradition in Comic Medievalist Cinema
'The past is a different and fairly disgusting country': The Middle Ages in recent British 'jocumentary'
Smelling the Past: Medieval Heritage Tourism and the Phenomenology of Ironic Nostalgia
Afterword: Laughing into the Future
Bibliography

Über Autor(innen)

D`arcens, Louise
Australian Research Council Future Fellow - Macquarie University, NSW

Louise D'Arcens is Associate Professor in English Literatures at the University of Wollongong.