Indecent Exposure: Gender, Politics, and Obscene Comedy in Middle English Literature

Nicole Nolan Sidhu

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press 2016

Indecent Exposure

Gender, Politics, and Obscene Comedy in Middle English Literature

Nicole Nolan Sidhu

In the series The Middle Ages Series

https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812292688

Overview
Contents

About this book

In Indecent Exposure, Nicole Nolan Sidhu explores obscene comedy in the literary and visual culture of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England. She proposes that Middle English writers used obscene comedy to grapple with the disturbances their society experienced in the century and a half following the Black Death.

Author / Editor information

Nicole Nolan Sidhu is Associate Professor of English at East Carolina University.

Reviews

"Indecent Exposure offers a field-changing and astute discussion of literary engagements with obscenity in Middle English literature. Although Nicole Sidhu's monograph focuses on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century obscene comedy in Middle English, it also provides a contextualization of this discourse in other European vernaculars and in a variety of literary and visual contexts, such as manuscript illuminations and devotional texts, sermons in particular."—Studies in the Age of Chaucer

"Fresh and provocative, Indecent Exposure is a substantive and original work that promises to change the way we think about obscene comedy in medieval texts."—Eve Salisbury, Western Michigan University

"Nicole Nolan Sidhu reorients how we think about the category of 'obscene comedy' by focusing on how it provides late medieval English authors with a new political language. This allows them to work within the purview of dominant ideologies while at the same time pursuing alternative questions or insurgent critiques of these same ideologies."—Glenn Burger, Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY

"In the current moment, characterized by prominence of obscenity in American political discourse and the use of satirical comedy as the most widespread form of political critique, Sidhu's analysis of the workings of obscene comedy is timely indeed . . . Indecent Exposure belongs on the bookshelf of not only medievalists interested in vernacular literary studies, humor, political resistance, and gender and sexuality studies, but also readers interested in the long history of media studies and social change."—Digital Philology

"[A] thoroughly fascinating study..Sidhu's book is an insightful and well-grounded look into how obscene comedy does more than provoke laughter in the works of fourteenth-and fifteenth-century authors."—Comitatus

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Note on The Fabliaux Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
Introduction Obscenity in Medieval Culture and Literature Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part I. Fourteenth – Century Pioneers
Chapter 1. Comedy and Critique Obscenity and Langland’s Reproof of Established Powers in Piers Plowman Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	35
Chapter 2. Chaucer’s Poetics of the Obscene Classical Narrative and Fabliau Politics in Fragment One of the Canterbury Tales and The Legend of Good Women Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	76
Part II. Fifteenth – Century Heirs
Chapter 3. The Henpecked Subject Misogyny, Poetry, and Masculine Community in the Writing of John Lydgate Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	113
Chapter 4. “Ryth Wikked” Christian Ethics and the Unruly Holy Woman in the Book of Margery Kempe Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	149
Chapter 5. Women’s Work, Companionate Marriage, and Mass Death in the Biblical Drama Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	188
Conclusion Lessons of the Medieval Obscene Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	229
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	237
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	271
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	293
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	301

Language: English
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Audience: College/higher education;
Pages
- Main content: 320
Illustrations
- Other: 7 illus.
Keywords: Literature; Women's Studies; Gender Studies; Medieval and Renaissance Studies; Literature; Cultural Studies

eBook

Published: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 9780812292688