Laughter and Awkwardness in Late Medieval England : Social Discomfort in the Literature of the Middle Ages

Watt, David; Elliott, Andrew B. R. (EDT); Merritt, Adrienne (EDT); Young, Helen (EDT)

ISBN 10: 1350375020 / ISBN 13: 9781350375024

Published by Bloomsbury Academic, 2025

About this Item

Unread book in perfect condition.

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Laughter and Awkwardness in Late Medieval England : Social Discomfort in the Literature of the Middle Ages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350375020
• ISBN 13: 9781350375024
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: As New

About this title

Synopsis

We live,’ according to Adam Kotsko, ‘in an awkward age.’ While this condition may present some challenges, it may also help us to be more attuned to awkwardness in other ages. This book pairs medieval texts with twenty-first century films or television programmes to explore what the resonance between them can tell us about living together in an awkward age. In this nuanced and engaging study, David Watt focuses especially, but not exclusively, on the 15th century, which seems to intervene awkwardly in the literary trajectory between Chaucer and the Renaissance. This book’s hypothesis is that the social discomfort depicted and engendered by writers as diverse as Thomas Hoccleve, Margery Kempe, and Sir Thomas Malory is a feature rather than a flaw. Laughter and Awkwardness in Late Medieval England explains that these authors have a great deal in common with other fifteenth-century authors, who generated embodied experiences of social discomfort in a range of genres by adopting and adapting literary techniques used by their predecessors and successors in slightly different ways. Like the twenty-first century texts with which they are paired, the late-medieval texts that feature in this book use the relationship between laughter and awkwardness to ask what it means to live with each other and how we can learn to live with ourselves.

About the Authors

David Watt is Professor in the Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media, at the University of Manitoba, Canada, where he also serves as head of his department.

Andrew B.R. Elliott is an independent scholar and has published a range of articles and essays on historical film, television and video games from the classical world to the present. He is the author of Remaking the Middle Ages (2010), which analyses medieval cinema, and he is the editor of Playing with the Past (2013; co-edited with Matthew Wilhelm Kapell), which examines the depiction of the past in video games, and The Return of the Epic Film (2014), which examines the return of the sword and sandals epic in the cinema. His latest book, Medievalism, Politics, and Mass Media (2017), explores the uses of the past in social media and mainstream news reporting.

Adrienne Merritt is Assistant Professor of German Studies at University of Colorado Boulder, USA.

Helen Young is Lecturer in Writing and Literature at Deakin University, Australia. She is the author of Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness (2015) and Fantasy and Science Fiction Medievalisms: From Isaac Asimov to A Game of Thrones (2015).