Dark Chaucer: An Assortment

Edited by Eileen A. Joy & Nicola Masciandaro

Chaucer’s work is subtly shot through with dark moments that open into obscure and irresolvably haunting vistas, passages into which one might fall head-first and never reach the abyssal bottom. Opting to dilate rather than cordon off this darkness, this volume assembles a variety of attempts to follow such moments into their folds of blackness and horror, to chart their endless sorrows and recursive gloom . . . as if there were no way [back] out. Not that this collection finds only emptiness and non-meaning there. You never know what you will discover in the dark.

Contents: Candace Barrington, “Dark Whiteness” – Brantley L. Bryant, “Saturn’s Darkness” – Ruth Evans, “Wife, Can’t You See I’m Drowning?” – Aranye Fradenburg, “Love Shack” – Gaelan Gilbert, “Chaucer’s Four Last Things” – Leigh Harrison, “Black Gold” – Eileen A. Joy, “Before the Folk She Strips Herself” – Daniel T. Kline, “Night of the Living Litel Clergeon” – Anna Klosowska, “An Amorous Compleint: from Aloon to Wo” – Nicola Masciandaro, “Half Dead” – J. Allan Mitchell, “In the Event of the Franklin’s Tale” – Travis Neel & Andrew Richmond, “Black as the Crow” – Michael O’ Rourke, “Anas(s)tomosis” – Hannah Priest, “Constance Unravelling” – Christopher Roman, “Krafft-Ebing Reads the Monk’s Tale” – Lisa Schamess, “L’O de V: A Palimpsest” – Myra Seaman, “Disconsolate Art” – Karl Steel, “Kill Me, Save Me, Let Me Go: Custance, Virginia, Emelye” – Elaine Treharne, “Reading Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale as Hagioclasm” – Bob Valasek, “The Light has Lifted” – Lisa Weston, “Suffer the Little Children, Or, Ruminations on the Faith of Zombies.” This assortment of dark morsels will also feature a prose-poem Preface by Gary Shipley and a Snippet-View Biblio-Index of Harrowing Vortices by Issac Linder.

RELEASE DATE: Winter 2012

Eileen A. Joy teaches at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and her main interests are in Old English literature, cultural studies, embodied affectivities, ethics, and the post/human. She is the founder and co-editor of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies and the Lead Ingenitor of the BABEL Working Group. She is also the co-editor of The Postmodern Beowulf (West Virginia University Press, 2007) and Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (Palgrave, 2007).

Nicola Masciandaro teaches at Brooklyn College, is the author of The Voice of the Hammer: The Meaning of Work in Middle English Literature (Notre Dame, 2006), and is also founder and co-editor of Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary. He has published widely on medieval philosophy, mysticism, individuation, geophilosophy, beheading, sorrow, spontaneity, and metal music, among other subjects.