How soon is now? : medieval texts, amateur readers, and the queerness of time
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Bibliographic Information
How soon is now? : medieval texts, amateur readers, and the queerness of time
Duke University Press, 2012
- : [pbk.]
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [223]-244) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
How Soon Is Now? performs a powerful critique of modernist temporal regimes through its revelatory exploration of queer ways of being in time as well as of the potential queerness of time itself. Carolyn Dinshaw focuses on medieval tales of asynchrony and on engagements with these medieval temporal worlds by amateur readers centuries later. In doing so, she illuminates forms of desirous, embodied being that are out of sync with ordinarily linear measurements of everyday life, that involve multiple temporalities, that precipitate out of time altogether. Dinshaw claims the possibility of a fuller, denser, more crowded now that theorists tell us is extant but that often eludes our temporal grasp.Whether discussing Victorian men of letters who parodied the Book of John Mandeville, a fictionalized fourteenth-century travel narrative, or Hope Emily Allen, modern coeditor of the early-fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe, Dinshaw argues that these and other medievalists outside the academy inhabit different temporalities than modern professionals operating according to the clock. How Soon Is Now? clears space for amateurs, hobbyists, and dabblers who approach medieval worlds from positions of affect and attachment, from desires to build other kinds of worlds. Unruly, untimely, they urge us toward a disorderly and asynchronous collective.
Table of Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction. How Soon Is Now? 1
1. Asynchrony Stories: Monks, Kings, Sleepers, and Other Time Travelers 41
2. Temporally Oriented: The Book of John Mandeville, British India, Philology, and the Postcolonial Medievalist 73
3. In the Now: Margery Kempe, Hope Emily Allen, and Me 105
4. Out of Sync in the Catskills: Rip van Winkle, Geoffrey Crayon, James I, and Other Ghosts 129
Epilogue. The Lay of the Land: Amateur Medievalism and Queer Love in A Canterbury Tale 153
Notes 171
Bibliography 223
Index 245
by "Nielsen BookData"