Bad Medievalism and the Modernity Problem
Fordham University Press (Verlag)
978-1-5315-1240-8 (ISBN)
Humanists have long insisted on a chasm separating modernity and the Middle Ages. In Bad Medievalism and the Modernity Problem, Kathy Lavezzo demonstrates how the temporal divide scholars typically accept is a fiction that has shaped racial discourse over a longue durée. The hard line drawn between "then" and "now" is of a piece with the line separating whiteness from humans deemed irrevocably other. Thus, Lavezzo advocates a "bad" - that is, depressing and disturbing, even nauseating - historicism attuned to the interpenetration of race, whiteness and periodicity in the "west."
Teasing out the dialectical invocation of both periods by figures as diverse as W. E. B. Du Bois, Carolyn Bynum, Stuart Hall, Johan Huizinga, Paule Marshall, Karl Marx, Gloria Naylor, J. R. R. Tolkien and Sylvia Wynter, Lavezzo demonstrates how the tension between and across categories of the "medieval" and the "modern" has mobilized intense emotional and political responses.
Inspired by Lavezzo’s discovery that Hall, the beloved founder of cultural studies, planned as a student at Oxford to become a medievalist, but was dissuaded from that path by his teacher Tolkien, Bad Medievalism unpacks the implications of that charged encounter. Central chapters contrast Tolkien’s white heritage medievalism with a speculative inquiry into the Piers Plowman dissertation that Hall never wrote.
Other chapters assess the white "feel" of periodization by scholars including Jacob Burckhardt, Huizinga, Fredric Jameson, and Bynum, and draw on theorists including Du Bois and Wynter to chart the medieval roots of a racialized discourse of progress and primitivism. Bad Medievalism culminates in new readings of Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Cafe and Paule Marshall’s The Fisher King, demonstrating their importance as productively pessimistic engagements with the racial legacies of both the medieval and the modern.
Kathy Lavezzo is Professor of English at the University of Iowa. She is the author of Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community, 1000-1534 and The Accommodated Jew: English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton, and the editor of Imagining a Medieval English Nation.
Preface vii
Introduction: Race, Affect, Periodization 1
Part I: White Mythologies of History
1 Modernity, the Medieval, and the Feel of Periodization 37
2 "Between Then and Now": The Veil of Periodization 76
Part II: Tolkien vs. Hall: White Heritage Fantasy and Diasporic Critique
3 Whiteness, Medievalism, Immigration: Rethinking Tolkien through Stuart Hall 109
4 Stuart Hall’s Piers Plowman 141
Part III: Black Feminist Modernism, Black Feminist Medievalism
5 High Theory, Low Feelings: Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Cafe 181
6 Tradition and the Individual Black Talent: Contesting Malory and Modernism in The Fisher King 216
Acknowledgments 249
Appendix: Stuart Hall’s First Publication 253
Notes 259
Index 323
| Erscheinungsdatum | 08.10.2025 |
|---|---|
| Zusatzinfo | 4 b/w illustrations |
| Verlagsort | New York |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 152 x 229 mm |
| Gewicht | 599 g |
| Themenwelt | Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik | |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft | |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie | |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie | |
| ISBN-10 | 1-5315-1240-2 / 1531512402 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1-5315-1240-8 / 9781531512408 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
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