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Dark Chaucer: An Assortment

  • Edited by Nicola Masciandaro, Myra Seaman, Eileen A. Joy

Published on December 23, 2012 by punctum books

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Pages
224 pages
Languages
English
Dimensions
5⤫8 in.
ISBN (Paperback)
ISBN: 978-0-615-70107-3 (Paperback)
DOI
DOI: 10.21983/P3.0018.1.00(opens in new tab)
BISAC subject codes
BISAC: LIT004120, LIT011000
Thema subject codes
THEMA: 1DDU-GB-E, 3KLW, DSBB

Read Marion Turner’s review of Dark Chaucer in Studies in the Age of Chaucer HERE(opens in new tab).

Although widely beloved for its playfulness and comic sensibility, Chaucer’s poetry is also 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, scenes and events where everything could possibly go horribly wrong or where everything that matters seems, if even momentarily, altogether and irretrievably lost. And then sometimes, things really do go wrong. 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, and to take depth soundings in the darker recesses of the Chaucerian lakes in order to bring back palm- or bite-sized pieces (black jewels) of bitter Chaucer that could be shared with others… an “assortment,” if you will. Not that this collection finds only emptiness and non-meaning in these caves and lakes. You never know what you will discover in the dark.

Contents

  1. Frontmatter (i–xv)

    Myra Seaman, Eileen A. Joy, Nicola Masciandaro

  2. and here we are as on a darkling plain (i–vii)

    Gary J. Shipley

  3. Dark Whiteness: Benjamin Brawley and Chaucer (1–11)

    Candace Barrington

  4. Saturn's Darkness (13–27)

    Brantley Bryant, Alia

  5. A Dark Stain and a Non-Encounter (29–41)

    Ruth Evans

  6. Chaucerian Afterlives: Reception and Eschatology (43–57)

    Gaelan Gilbert

  7. Black Gold: The Former (and Future) Age (59–69)

    Leigh Harrison

  8. Half Dead: Parsing Cecelia (71–90)

    Nicola Masciandaro

  9. In the Event of the Franklin's Tale (91–102)

    J. Allan Mitchell

  10. Black as the Crow (103–116)

    Travis Neel, Andrew Richmond

  11. Unravelling Constance (117–123)

    Hannah Priest

  12. L'O de V: A Palimpsest (125–137)

    Lisa Schamess

  13. Disconsolate Art (139–149)

    Myra Seaman

  14. Kill Me, Save Me, Let Me Go: Custance, Virginia, Emelye (151–160)

    Karl Steel

  15. The Physician's Tale as Hagioclasm (161–171)

    Elaine Treharne

  16. The Light Has Lifted: Trickster Pandare (173–180)

    Bob Valasek

  17. Suffer the Little Children, or, A Rumination on the Faith of Zombies (181–190)

    Lisa Weston

  18. The Dark is Light Enough: The Layout of the Tale of Sir Thopas (191–203)

    Thomas White

  19. Backmatter (205–209)

    Myra Seaman, Eileen A. Joy, Nicola Masciandaro

Biographies

  • Nicola Masciandaro

    (Editor)

    Brooklyn College

    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(opens in new tab). He has published widely on medieval philosophy, mysticism, individuation, geophilosophy, beheading, sorrow, spontaneity, and metal music, among other subjects.

  • Myra Seaman

    (Editor)

    College of Charleston

    Myra Seaman teaches at the College of Charleston. She has published on Middle English romance, textual studies, gender studies, dream visions, medievalisms, and posthumanisms (medieval and modern). She co-edited the essay collection Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (2007). She is co-editor of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies and co-founder of the BABEL Working Group. She is currently working on an extended project that investigates affective literacy among the late medieval English gentry through an object-oriented ontological approach.

  • Eileen A. Joy

    (Editor) (opens in new tab)

    Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

    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(opens in new tab). 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).

Reviews

Review of Dark Chaucer: An Assortment, ed. by Myra Seaman, Eileen Joy, and Nicola Masciandaro(opens in new tab)

Marion Turner

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Genres

  • Literary Studies
  • Premodern

Keywords

  • Chaucer
  • literary criticism
  • medieval
  • poetry
  • sarkness