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Monstrous Femininity and the Female Body in Medieval Chivalric Romance (PhD dissertation) by Jenny L. Howe is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is Monstrous Femininity and the Female Body in Medieval Chivalric Romance (PhD dissertation) about?

Monstrous Femininity considers the female body’s function as a mechanism of knowledge production/meaning-making within medieval chivalric romance. Though often identified as a “woman’s genre,” romance is trenchantly organized by patriarchal values. Most often, female figures within these texts serve as proving grounds for the protagonist’s entrance into chivalric masculinity, the acquisition, exchange, or even elision of the heroine cementing his identity as a knight. This dissertation argues that female bodies function as points of rupture or fissure that unsettle this normative gender system. Examining romances from Chaucer, Malory, Chretien de Troyes, and Spenser alongside a number of anonymous Middle English romances, I demonstrate that female bodies across romance conflate forms of masculinity and femininity and open up the borders of the body through bleeding, excess, and desire. I read romance’s disruptive female bodies as an extension of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s theory of the monster, understanding female corporeality within romance as a site of instability, of systemic crisis and collapse. I trace this thread of monstrous disruption through various forms of female corporeali

Who reads Monstrous Femininity and the Female Body in Medieval Chivalric Romance (PhD dissertation)?

Author

Jenny L. Howe

Publisher

Tufts University

Published

2014

Language

EN

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

History, History & Criticism, Humanities