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Women’s Restorative Medievalisms
Forgotten Pasts and Unimagined Futures
Edited by Suzanne M. Edwards and Matthew X. Vernon
Series: Arc Medievalist
208 Pages, Trim size: 6 x 9 in
- Hardcover
- 9781802701623
- Published: October 2024
Revising the histories of medievalism—the processes by which the Middle Ages are reimagined in later moments to varied political, social, and cultural ends—is critical to the field’s turn away from its oppressive roots and towards a richer conception of the past. Grounded in intersectional feminist interpretive frameworks, Women’s Restorative Medievalisms examines how contemporary women writers engage the premodern past to animate intertwined histories of oppression and resistance in service of visionary futures. These medievalisms create temporal dialogue between the past and the present to restore the voices of women who have been overlooked in medieval studies and medievalism studies. The book’s contemporary focus will appeal both to students and medieval studies scholars who seek to understand the field’s present value amid the backlash of patriarchal, white supremacist power.
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Restoring Forgotten Pasts for Unimagined Futures, by Suzanne M. Edwards and Matthew X. Vernon
Part 1. Founding Counterstories
Chapter 1. Plantation Labour and Counter-Memory in Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée, by Jonathan Hsy
Chapter 2. Tradition and the Individual (Black) Talent: Eliot, Malory, Marshall, by Kathy Lavezzo
Chapter 3. Dilapidated Medievalism and Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Anniad”, by Seamus Dwyer and Candace Barrington
Part 2. New Topographies and Temporalities
Chapter 4. Periodization and Restoring Women’s Stories in Forest of Enchantments and Juliet’s Nurse, by Usha Vishnuvajjala
Chapter 5. N’ya-hap me-ye-moom: Chaucer, California, and the Literary Landscapes of Bailey’s Café, by Jenny Adams
Part 3. Telling Silences
Chapter 6. Antisemitism as Entertainment in the Medieval Mystery Novel, by Samantha Katz Seal
Chapter 7. 1492 in Historical Fiction: Manuscripts, Memory, and Loss, by Sara V. Torres
Chapter 8. The Transgender Paladin of Charlemagne, by M. W. Bychowski
Part 4. Critical Creativity
Chapter 9. Feminist Poetic Encounter in Pattie McCarthy’s margerykempething, by Carissa M. Harris
Chapter 10. Not-Knowing in Fiction and Scholarship, by Kim Zarins
Index
Suzanne M. Edwards is Professor of English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Lehigh University. She is the author of The Afterlives of Rape in Medieval English Literature (2016) and articles on Gloria Naylor’s medievalism.
Matthew X. Vernon is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Davis. His first book, The Black Middle Ages (2018), explores the understudied relationship between medievalism and Blackness in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature.