Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media (NOW IN PAPERBACK)
Richard Burt
Palgrave Macmillan, 12/21/2010
ISBN: 978-0-230-10560-7, ISBN10: 0-230-10560-2
6 x 9 1/4 inches, 294 pages,
Trade Paperback
$28.00
Hardcover
$79.00
Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media contextualizes historical films in an innovative way--not only relating them to the history of cinema, but also to premodern and early modern media. This philological approach to the (pre)history of cinema engages both old media such as scrolls, illuminated manuscripts, the Bayeux Tapestry, and new digital media such as DVDs, HD DVDs, and computers. Burt examines the uncanny repetitions that now fragment films into successively released alternate cuts and extras (footnote tracks, audiocommentaries, and documentaries) that (re)structure and reframe historical films, thereby presenting new challenges to historicist criticism and film theory. With a double focus on recursive narrative frames and the cinematic paratexts of medieval and early modern film, this book calls our attention to strange, sometimes opaque phenomena in film and literary theory that have previously gone unrecognized.
Contents:
Introduction: Film Before and After New Media, Anec-notology, and the Philological Uncanny
The Medieval and Early Modern Cinematographosphere: De-composing Paratexts, Media Analogues, and the Living Dead Hands of Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, and New Historicism
The Passion of
El Cid and the Circumfixion of Cinematic History: Stereotypology/Phantomimesis/Cryptomorphoses
Cutting and (Re)Running from the (Medieval) Middle East: The Return of the Film Epic and the Uncanny Mise-hors-scènes of
Kingdom of Heaven’s Double DVDs
Le détour de Martin Guerre: “Anec-notes” of Historical Film Advisors, Archival Aberrations, and the Uncanny Subject of the Academic Paratext
Epilegomenon: Anec-Post-It-Note to Self: Freud, Greenblatt, and the New Historicist Uncanny
The Author:
Richard Burt is Professor of English and Film and Media Studies at the University of Florida. He is the author of
Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares: Queer Theory and American Kiddie Culture; L
icensed by Authority: Ben Jonson and the Discourses of Censorship; and the editor of
Shakespeare After Shakespeare;
Shakespeare After Mass Media; and
The Administration of Aesthetics. Burt also co-edited a special issue of
Exemplaria on “Movie Medievalism” and held a Fulbright scholarship in Berlin, Germany from 1995–96.
Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism: Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters
Clare Broome Saunders
Palgrave Macmillan, January 2009
ISBN: 978-0-230-60793-4, ISBN10: 0-230-60793-4,
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 244 pages,
Hardcover
$85.00
In a thoughtful and detailed study,
Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism considers the ways in which women poets, biographers, and historians used medieval motifs and settings to enable them to comment on controversial contemporary issues. Broome Saunders’ illuminating discussion focuses on women working during the socio-political and religious upheaval of the nineteenth century and mines the poetry of Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning; portrayals of Joan of Arc and Guinevere in art and literature; and non-fiction sources such as women’s letters and diaries during the Napoleonic and Crimean Wars.
Contents:
Recasting the Courtly: Translations of Medieval Language and Form in the Nineteenth Century
“Though Females are Forbidden to Interfere in Politics”: War, Medievalism, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Writer
“It’s Strictly the Woman’s Part and Men Understand it So”: Romance, Gender and the Spectacle of the Crimean
The End of Chivalry?: Joan of Arc and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Writer
Queenship, Chivalry and “Queenly” Women in the Age of Victoria
Guinevere: The Medieval Queen in the Nineteenth Century
Re-reading Guinevere: Women Illustrators, Tennyson and Morris
The Author:
Clare Broome Saunders is Research Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. She has written on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Louisa Stuart Costello, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and her work has appeared in
Victorian Poetry.
Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain: Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters
Clare A. Simmons
Palgrave Macmillan, 2/1/2011
ISBN: 978-0-230-10374-0, ISBN10: 0-230-10374-X,
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 256 pages, Includes: 5 pgs figs,
Hardcover
$80.00
Popular Medievalism in Romantic-Era Britain examines ways in which British writers and readers used the idea of the Middle Ages to challenge contemporary political structures and to claim historical national rights at a time when fears that Britain would follow the example of the French Revolution caused the British government to undermine individual and collective rights. Through the consideration of canonical authors such as Blake, Scott, and Wordsworth and of lesser-studied works such as radical press writings and popular drama, this study suggests that the imaginative appeal to the social structures and literary forms of the Middle Ages served as a powerful means of raising awareness of Britain’s past and the tradition of freedom.
Contents:
Rites and Rights: The Topography of Ancient British Law
The National Melody
Medievalism Onstage in the French Revolutionary Era
The Radical Bestiary
Buried Alive: Gothic Reading and Medievalist Subjectivity
Scottish Lawyers, Feudal Law
The Author:
Clare A. Simmons is a Professor of English at The Ohio State University. She is the author of
Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature; E
yes Across the Channel: French Revolutions, Party History, and British Writing 1830-1882; and numerous essays on nineteenth-century British literature. She is the co-editor of Prose Studies and has edited the essay collection
Medievalism and the Quest for the “Real” Middle Ages and Charlotte Mary Yonge’s novel
The Clever Woman of the Family.
Medievalism, Multilingualism, and Chaucer
The New Middle Ages
Mary Catherine Davidson
Palgrave Macmillan, December 2009
ISBN: 978-0-230-60297-7, ISBN10: 0-230-60297-5,
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 224 pages,
Hardcover $90.00
Medievalism, Multilingualism, and Chaucer examines multilingual identity in the writing of Gower, Langland, and Chaucer. Mary Catherine Davidson traces monolingual habits of inquiry to nineteenth-century attitudes toward French, which had first influenced popular constructions of medieval English in such historical novels as Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. In re-reading medieval traditions in the origins of English from Geoffrey of Monmouth, this book describes how multilingual practices reflected attitudes toward English in the age of Chaucer.
Contents:
Introduction: Monolingualism and Middle English Traditions of Contact and Conflict in the History of English Medievalism and Monolingualism
Hengist’s Tongue: A Medieval History of Middle English
"And in Latyn . . . a wordes fewe”: Contact and Medieval Conformity
Multilingual Writing and William Langland Chaucer’s “Diversite”
Afterword: Postcolonialism and Chaucer’s English
The Author:
Mary Catherine Davidson is Assistant Professor of English at Glendon College, York University.
Finding Saint Francis in Literature and Art
The New Middle Ages
Edited by Cynthia Ho, Beth A. Mulvaney, and John K. Downey
Palgrave Macmillan, July 2009
ISBN: 978-0-230-60286-1, ISBN10: 0-230-60286-X,
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 240 pages,
Hardcover $89.95
Finding Saint Francis in Literature and Art demonstrates that remembering Saint Francis of Assisi should take place on many levels. The authors in this collection of essays use the tools of various intellectual disciplines to examine what we now know about Saint Francis in his own era and how the story of Il Poverello has been appropriated in our own times. This critical re-discovery of the artistic and textual narratives of Francis of Assisi contributes to our cultural memory by reflecting on the continuities and changes in the way Francis is understood.
Contents:
PART I: Francis in Medieval Text and Painting
Franciscan Spirituality and Narrative at Assisi: The Legend of St. Francis in Text and Painting--Beth Mulvaney
The Miraculous Moment: Expressing the Spiritual Experience in Thirteenth-Century Frescos at Assisi--Janet Snyder
Francis Preaching to the Sultan: Art in the Hagiography of a Saint--Mahmood Ibrahim
PART II: Franciscan Devotion
The Wolf in the Forest: St. Francis and the Italian Eremitical Tradition--Rodger Payne
What Has Paris to Do with Assisi? The Theological Creation of a Saint--John V. Apczynski
Franciscans in the World--Felix Heap and Jesus Gonzales
The Visual Piety of the Sacro Monte di Orta--Cynthia Ho
PART III: Francis Remembered in New Contexts
A Christian Modernist and the Awe of Nature as Presented in Olivier Messiaen’s Opera,
Saint François d’Assise--John McClain
Constructing Saint Francis for the Twenty-first Century--Janet McCann
Capturing the Gravity and Grace of St. Francis of Assisi on Stage: A Study of Divine Reciprocity--John Bowers
St. Francis in the Twenty-first Century--John Hart
Canticle of Memory: Political Theology and Francis of Assisi--John Downey
The Authors:
Cynthia Ho is Professor of Literature and Language and Director of the Humanities Program at the University of North Carolina, Asheville. Previously, she served as Chair of the Literature and Language Department and as the National Endowment for the Humanities Chair for the Humanities. She recently edited Crossing the Bridge: Comparative Essays on Heian Japanese and Medieval European Women.
Beth A. Mulvaney is Professor of Art at Meredith College where she is Director of the Honors Program. She has written on the frescoes of St. Francis at San Francesco, Assisi and the artists Duccio and Giotto.
John K. Downey is Professor of Religious Studies at Gonzaga University and a former Director of the Coolidge Research Colloquium. He is co-editor of Missing God? Cultural Amnesia and Political Theology.
Here's another recent book from McFarland. My apologies for not posting on it sooner. (I'm usually the most current when it comes to movie medievalism, and I'm not sure when it first appeared in their online catalog, as it is not linked to their "Medieval Studies" list.) Its author, Andrew Elliott, was a presenter at our medieval TV panels in 2007 and does interesting work on filmic and televisual medievalisms, and, besides the book, he also has an essay on medieval themes in the Monk television series in the collection Monk and Philosophy (Open Court, 2010) and reviewed Martha Driver and Sid Ray's collection Shakespeare and the Middle Ages: Essays on the Performance and Adaptation of the Plays with Medieval Sources or Settings for the next number of Arthuriana. In addition, Elliott has an essay on Asterix and the Vikings in Kevin J. Harty's forthcoming collection Reel Vikings: Cinematic Depictions of Medieval Scandinavia.
