13 Theatricalising Sci-Fi: Theatre and the Multiverse in Mouse: The Persistence of an Unlikely Thought (Daniel Kitson, 2016) and Constellations (Nick Payne, 2012) was published in Theatricality and the Arts on page 239.

ABSTRACT This article draws on recent scholarship in premodern critical race theory and the history of childhood to argue that in the Prioress’s Tale, whiteness signifies innocence and describes innocent bodies. In the tale, the color white gains its meaning from its contexts in devotional and antisemitic literature in which it evokes milk and breastfeeding, which in turn evokes a complex set of ideas about heredity and learned culture. By referencing this tangle of meanings around whiteness, the Prioress’s Tale resituates Christian anxieties about the nature and value of childish innocence into the genre of the antisemitic miracle, whose primary anxieties are focused on the coherence of the Christian body and the Christian community. When the “white metaphors” of devotional literature move into an explicitly racial and racializing genre, they become part of race-making discourses of white Christianity or Christian whiteness.

Editor's Note: I am thrilled to have had the chance to interview Anna Wilson for this issue. She is the 2022 recipient of the Felicia Campbell Innovative Contributions to Popular Culture Studies Award. Her work with fan fiction is illuminating and she giv

It is a cliché of any introduction to fan fiction to claim its precursors in canonical authors, including Virgil, Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, and Milton. But what does it mean to call the Aeneid or the Divine Comedy fan fiction? What kinds of analyses might such an approach generate? A survey of the nascent field of premodern fan fiction studies reveals three main axes of approaches to reading premodern literature through the lens of fan fiction (poaching, transformation, and affect), which are organized in turn around different definitions of fan fiction, suggesting one possible interdisciplinary theoretical model. Rather than focusing on the selection of canonical texts, this burgeoning and vibrant field of study must instead focus on developing its methodology.

Previous articleNext article No AccessPetrarch’s Queer HistoryAnna WilsonAnna Wilson Search for more articles by this author Anna Wilson is Assistant Professor of English at Harvard University ([email protected])PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 95, Number 3July 2020 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/709220 Views: 580Total views on this site Copyright 2020 by the Medieval Academy of America.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Reviewed by: The Medieval Invention of Travel by Shayne Aaron Legassie Anna Wilson shayne aaron legassie, The Medieval Invention of Travel. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. Pp. xiii, 302. isbn: 978–0–226–44662–2. $34.95. This ambitious book surveys western European travel literature from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, tracing the emergence in the medieval period of several styles, themes, and ethics of travel that would shape subsequent travel literatures until the industrial revolution. Legassie makes an argument for a distinct medieval genre of travel literature that includes two mutually influential strands: accounts of pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and of journeys to the far east for missionary purposes or trade. The methodology is primarily literary-critical, but there is a strong book history element throughout, wherein Legassie highlights specific material instances of works [End Page 115] in order to enhance close readings or to discuss the circulation and use of ideas about travel. The story this book tells is broadly one of historical development of the travel literature genre prior to its oft-presumed emergence with the early modern European colonial expansions; however, Legassie avoids a teleological narrative in favor of a 'rhizomatic' survey, making the important but frequently overlooked point that 'developments accrete and—at times—coexist unharmoniously' in this as in so many literary genres (p. 143). As such, the study is divided into three parts linked by theme rather than location in time or space. Part one focuses on constructions of narrative authority. Chapter one traces the differing approaches to the 'prestige economy of long-distance knowledge' (p. 22)—a concept Legassie develops in conversation with anthropologist Mary Helms' 'long-distance specialist'—in Marco Polo's Divisament dou monde and William of Rubruck's Itinerarium. Chapter two argues for an increasing emphasis on the labor and physical trials of travel by authors who apparently feared that their narratives might strain the credulity of their medieval readers; texts discussed here include John of Plano Carpini's Historia Mongolorum, Odoric of Pordenone's Relatio, and The Book of John Mandeville. Part two is a valuable and extensive survey of medieval pilgrimage literature, including clerical- and non-clerical narratives, Jerusalem Inventories, and logs or diaries. In chapter four, Legassie argues that these texts attest to a sophisticated mnemonic praxis—he draws heavily on Carruthers' classic studies on memory—through which pilgrimage becomes 'literate labor.' In what Legassie names 'the synthetic tradition' of (largely clerical) pilgrimage accounts, the composition of the text is part of the devotional work of pilgrimage, accomplished through 'memory work' before, during, and after the journey. The readings of these texts complement, but would benefit from greater engagement with, recent scholarship on 'virtual travel' or pilgrimage meditation by scholars such as Anthony Bale and Kathryn Rudy. Chapter five tackles the role of empirical observation in pilgrimage literature, tracing the rise in interest in writers' investigative methods for determining the history of places and objects in the Holy Land, and the rise of the 'Mediterranean turn' wherein places on the way to the Holy Land and the journey itself become subjects of scrutiny. Part three enters into the divergent styles of travel emerging post-1300, with a chapter on Petrarch and a chapter on Pero Tafur. Legassie's reading of Petrarch's travel letters in Familiares I–V and his Itinerarium reveals Petrarch's careful curation of a narrative arc that encompasses his change from an optimistic to jaded attitude to the ethical value of travel, corresponding to his changing political attitudes to Italian nationalism, and to his rejection of vernacular poetical modes for Latin epic. Legassie's intriguing approach to Petrarch's epistolary work as 'diasporic' rather than 'exilic' makes this a valuable addition to scholarship on Petrarch's relatively understudied travel letters. Chapter seven brings to the fore a theme which has run through much of the other travel literature Legassie discusses: concern with the ethics of travel. In Pero Tafur's fifteenth-century travel narrative, this concern is played out in the tension between the text's need to present Muslim lands as hostile territories in order to enhance the dramatic daring of its hero, and its investment...

Diverting Authorities argues for the emergence of print glossing as a distinct genre over the course of the sixteenth century, with each chapter focusing on a few suggestive works in broadly chronological order. Griffiths establishes that early printers considered the gloss an important part of a text, rather than a disposable apparatus, and that the gloss retained its status in early works composed for print. The book’s subject is the ‘diverting gloss’ which complicates or even destabilizes a text rather than elucidating it. Such glosses, she argues, suggest the multiplicity and multivocality of early modern glosses, and are places to explore questions of authorial and readerly control. Many of the glosses Griffiths examines might equally be understood as failed glosses which aim to elucidate but miss the mark; she argues that it is mistaken to dismiss these glosses based on modern taxonomies of glossing (such as William Slights’), and that we should consider how these apparent failures may subvert, distract, amuse, or unsettle.

The Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich by Thomas of Monmouth is most notorious as the first example of a ritual murder accusation against a Jewish community in medieval England. However, the overwhelming focus on the Life's place in a linear history of ever-increasing persecution has obscured the text's own interest in non-linear chronology and temporality. This article draws on recent discussions of temporality in queer theory to show how William's body becomes a point of temporal instability in the Life, and suggests a reconsideration of the figure of the child in queer readings of narrative time.

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsElizabeth Scala, Desire in the Canterbury Tales. (Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture.) Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015. Pp. 248. $62.95. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1278-3.Anna WilsonAnna WilsonUniversity of Toronto Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 91, Number 4October 2016 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/687999 Views: 117Total views on this site Copyright 2016 by the Medieval Academy of America. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

In this article, I argue for greater consideration of the role of affect in fan fiction when comparing it with literary forms from antiquity. Fan fiction uses an affective hermeneutics—knowing through feeling—and as a literary form it is inextricable from the fannish discourses that produce it. Yuletide letters—story requests in the annual fan fiction gift exchange for historical RPF—show how fan fiction readers and writers frame knowledge of history in terms of affect in order to fill the gaps in the past.

This chapter presents the non-traditional molds of our interludes and engages in mapping through rhizomatic dialogue inspired by Bakhtin and Deleuze and Guattari while mimicking the dialogic forms of hooks and SooHoo. Taking action can start with small steps. Taking action may mean joining PFLAG, starting a club, getting out your bullhorn, being loud and proud and publicly unwavering in your commitment for social justice and safe schools. As educators, we need to see children as unique and diverse, embrace all forms of diversity within the classroom, and recognize hegemonic and heternormative patterns. The directionality of Marni E. Fisher sexual orientation is none of your business, nor does it affect how she performs her job, what she research, or how she write. It does not change my passion for creating alternative spaces in education for all student and teacher voices multicultural, (dis)abled, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Queer, (LGBTQ).