ODD BODIES AND VISIBLE ENDS IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE.
Series: NEW MIDDLE AGES
Publisher: PALGRAVE MACMILLAN; Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2006
Place of publication: NEW YORK
Language: und; eng
Number of pages: 198
Description: "This study traces how medieval audiences judge bodies (as saved or damned, human or monstrous) from Doomsday visions to beauty contests. It exposes how medieval texts manipulate narrative time and its visual evidence, like marked bodies. Anxieties about time, death, and Doomsday transform bodies (magically or literally) even in romances. Employing cultural and formalist approaches, this study breaks new ground on the historical obsession about ends and changes, reflected in different genres spanning several hundred years. It lays crucial foundations for the study of bodies - judged by deformity, gender, and other viewed perspectives - in medieval narrative and beyond."--BOOK JACKET.