Happy Pride: Queering the Poetic Past

During the month of June, MIP will be featuring works in our New Queer Medievalisms and Premodern Transgressive Literatures series that explore what it has meant to be queer through the ages. We want to share our publications in queer studies with all of you in a spirit of love, visibility, and affirmation—to spread the word about our series that provide a home for important work in queer medieval studies; to share fascinating blog posts, podcasts, and open access resources related to these works; and to support the work of our authors and welcome new authors to publish with us. Happy Pride!

The second book in MIP's New Queer Medievalisms series, "Postmodern Poetry and Queer Medievalisms: Time Mechanics," builds on recent scholarship on contemporary poetry in relation to medieval literature, focusing on postmodern poets who work with the medieval in a variety of ways. Such recent projects invert or “queer” the usual transactional nature of engagements with older forms of literature, in which readers are asked to exchange some small measure of bewilderment at archaic language or forms for a sense of having experienced a medieval text.

The poets under consideration in this volume demand that readers grapple with the ways in which we are still “medieval” – in other words, the ways in which the questions posed by their medieval source material still reverberate and hold relevance for today’s world. They do so by challenging the primacy of present over past, toppling the categories of old and new, and suggesting new interpretive frameworks for contemporary and medieval poetry alike -- in short, by “queering” our poetic past.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: The Opening of the Field, by David Hadbawnik
• “A Real Fictional Depth”: Transtexuality & Transformation in Robert Glück’s "Margery Kempe," by Robin Tremblay-McGaw
• A Basket of Fire and the Laughter of God: Anne Sexton’s Queer Theopoetics, by Christopher Roman
• feeld Notes: Jos Charles’s Chaucerian “anteseedynts,” by Candace Barrington
• The Time Mechanic and the Theater: Translation, Performativity and Performance in the Old English of Karen Coonrod’s "Judith," W.H. Auden, and Thomas Meyer, by Daniel C. Remein
• Translation for the End Times: Peter O’Leary’s "The Sampo," by Sean Reynolds
• The Harlot and the Gygelot: Translation, Intertextuality, and Theft in Medbh McGuckian’s “The Good Wife Taught Her Daughter,” by Katharine Jager
• Queer Time, Queer Forms: Noir Medievalism and Patience Agbabi’s "Telling Tales," by Jonathan Hsy and Candace Barrington
• Speak Like a Child: Caroline Bergvall’s Medievalist Trilogy, by David Hadbawnik

New Queer Medievalisms explores new directions in the study of queer, gay, lesbian, transgender, intersex and asexual medieval identities and simultaneously expands the work of the queer Middle Ages beyond early English and continental studies. This series extends the important work of investigating the intersection of queer theory with the study of the Middle Ages by expanding the conception of queerness and queer identity. Almost every area of Medieval Studies has a dedicated group of scholars interrogating the connections between medieval topics and Queer Studies. This series will provide these scholars with a new venue dedicated to their work while also bringing new scholarly and geographic specialties into the conversation.

Keywords: Queer, gender, medieval, medievalism, transgender, sexuality, religion, history.

Geographical Scope: Global

Chronological Scope: 400-1500 CE