Hysteria, perversion, and paranoia in The Canterbury tales : "wild" analysis and the symptomatic storyteller / Becky Renee McLaughlin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McLaughlin, Becky Renee, author.

Series:

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture ; 25

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Chaucer, Geoffrey, -1400. Canterbury tales--Criticism and interpretation.

Chaucer, Geoffrey.

Canterbury tales (Chaucer, Geoffrey).

Hysteria in literature.

Paraphilias in literature.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Edition:

1.

Place of Publication:

Berlin : Medieval Institute Publications, [2020]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Beginning with the spectacle of hysteria, moving through the perversions of fetishism, masochism, and sadism, and ending with paranoia and psychosis, this book explores the ways that conflicts with the Oedipal law erupt on the body and in language in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, for Chaucer’s tales are rife with issues of mastery and control that emerge as conflicts not only between authority and experience but also between power and knowledge, word and flesh, rule books and reason, man and woman, same and other – conflicts that erupt in a macabre sprawl of broken bones, dismembered bodies, cut throats, and decapitations. Like the macabre sprawl of conflict in the Canterbury Tales, this book brings together a number of conflicting modes of thinking and writing through the surprising and perhaps disconcerting use of “shadow” chapters that speak to or against the four “central” chapters, creating both dialogue and interruption.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction, or A Long Preamble to a Tale

Chapter 1: The Prick of the Prioress, or Hysteria and Its Humors

Chapter 2: Portrait of the Hysteric as a Young Girl

Chapter 3: Masochist as Miscreant Minister: The Parable of the Pardoner’s Perverse Performance

Chapter 4: Confessing Animals

Chapter 5: Before There Was Sade, There Was Chaucer: Sadistic Sensibility in the Tales of the Man of Law, the Clerk, and the Physician

Chapter 6: Sadomasochism for (Neurotic) Dummies

Chapter 7: The Reeve’s Paranoid Eye, or The Dramatics of “Bleared” Sight

Chapter 8: Farting and Its (Dis)contents, or Call Me Absolon

Chapter 9: Retractor

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781501514104

1501514105

9781501514067

1501514067

OCLC:

1190718504