Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages [Hardcover]

This volume brings together contemporary popular entertainment, current political subjects, and medieval history and culture to investigate the intersecting and often tangled relations between politics, aesthetics, reality and fiction, in relation to issues of morality, identity, social values, power, and justice, both in the past and the present.Through a Glass, Darkly; E.A.Joy& M.J.Seaman Medieval Presentism Before the Present; N.Partner Medieval Histories and Modern Realism: Yet Another Origin of the Novel; N.Partner Back to the Future: The Limits of Living in the Liminal Past; B.McCormick Torture, Inquisition, Medievalism, Reality, TV - Steve Guthrie The Crisis of Legitimation in George Bush's America and Lancastrian England; D.Kline Models of (Im)perfection: Parodic Refunctioning in Spike TV's The Joe Schmo Show and Chaucer's Tale of Sir Thopas; K.K.Bell Vexed Lies and Videotape: Truth, Authority, and the Media; M.K.Ramsey Sacrificing Fiction in The Quest for [the Real] King Arthur; M.J.Seaman& J.Green Outwit, Outplay, Outlast: Moral Lessons from Handlyng Synne and Survivor; C.Ho& J.Driggers Exteriority Is Not a Negation But a Marvel: Hospitality, Terrorism, Levinas, Beowulf; E.A.Joy 'She appears as brightly radiant as she once was foul': Medieval Conversion Narratives and Contemporary Makeover Shows; A.J.Weisl Wolves, Outlaws, and Enemy Combatants; M.E.Moore Coda: Opening Time: Psychoanalysis and Medieval Culture; M.Uebel Intertemporality; J.Jerome Cohen

This book asks us to consider the gaps between the real and the staged, between truth and performance. More compellingly, it asks us to think about whether we can ever know the difference, whether we are so caught in prison houses of textual manipulation that resistance is, finally, futile. The book looks to medieval narratives of conversion, parody, temptation, power, torture, and finds resonances (both continuities and discontinuities) in such contemporary spectacles as reality televisiol£‹