The Performance of Middle English Culture : Essays on Chaucer and the Drama in Honor of Martin Stevens

Theatricality as a cultural process is vitally important in the middle ages; it encompasses not only the thematic importation of dramatic images into the Canterbury Tales, but also the social and ideological 'performativities' of the mystery and morality plays, metadramatic investments, and the ludic energies of Chaucerian discourses in general. The twelve essays collected here address for the first time this intersection, using contemporary theory and historical scholarship to treat a number of important critical problems, including the anthropology of theatrical performance; gender; allegory; Chaucerian metapoetics; intertextual play and jouissance; social mediation and rhetoric; genre; and the institutionality of medieval studies. JAMES J. PAXSON is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida; LAWRENCE M. CLOPPER is Professor of English at Indiana University; SYLVIA TOMASCHis Associate Professor of English at Hunter College, City University of New York. Contributors: KATHLEEN ASHLEY, MARLENE CLARK, RICHARD DANIELS, ALFRED DAVID, RICHARD K. EMMERSON, JOHN GANIM, WARREN GINSBERG, ROBERT W. HANNING, SHARON KRAUS, SETH LERER, WILLIAM MCLELLAN, PAMELA SHEINGORN, PETER W. TRAVIS First detailed examination of theatricality in Chaucer and in Middle English literature and culture as a whole. Theatricality as a cultural process is vitally important in the middle ages; it encompasses not only the thematic importation of dramatic images into the Canterbury Tales, but also the social and ideological `performativities' of the mystery and morality plays, metadramatic investments, and the ludic energies of Chaucerian discourses in general. The twelve essays collected here address for the first time this intersection, using contemporary theoryand historical scholarship to treat a number of important critical problems, including the anthropology of theatrical performance; gender; allegory; Chaucerian metapoetics; intertextual play and jouissance; social mediationand rhetoric; genre; and the institutionality of medieval studies. JAMES J. PAXSON is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida; LAWRENCE M. CLOPPER is Professor of English at Indiana University; SYLVIA TOMASCHis Associate Professor of English at Hunter College, City University of New York. Contributors: KATHLEEN ASHLEY, MARLENE CLARK, RICHARD DANIELS, ALFRED DAVID, RICHARD K. EMMERSON, JOHN GANIM, WARREN GINSBERG, ROBERT W. HANNING, SHARON KRAUS, SETH LERER, WILLIAM MCLELLAN, PAMELA SHEINGORN, PETER W. TRAVIS Cover......Page 1 Title......Page 4 ISBN......Page 5 Contents......Page 6 Contributors......Page 7 Foreword......Page 10 Introduction......Page 11 Sponsorship, Reflexivity and Resistance: Cultural Readings of the York Cycle Plays......Page 19 Eliding the "Medieval": Renaissance "New Historicism" and Sixteenth-Century Drama......Page 35 "Se in what stat thou doyst indwell": The Shifting Constructions of Gender and Power Relations in Wisdom......Page 53 The Chaucerian Critique of Medieval Theatricality......Page 69 The Experience of Modernity in Late Medieval Literature: Urbanism, Experience and Rhetoric in Some Early Descriptions of London......Page 87 Noah's Wife's Flood......Page 107 Textual Pleasure in the Miller's Tale......Page 121 Petrarch, Chaucer and the Making of the Clerk......Page 135 The Crisis of Mediation in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde......Page 153 Reading Chaucer Ah Ovo: Mock-Exemplum in the Nun's Priest's Tale......Page 171 A Postmodern Performance: Counter-Reading Chaucer's Clerk's Tale and Maxine Hong Kingston's "No Name Woman"......Page 193 Tabula Gratulatoria......Page 207 Using contemporary theory and historical scholarship, this is a detailed examination of theatricality in Chaucer and in Middle English literature and culture as a whole