Hysteria, Perversion, and Paranoia in “The Canterbury Tales” : : “Wild” Analysis and the Symptomatic Storyteller / / Becky Renee McLaughlin.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DG Ebook Package 2020
• VerfasserIn: McLaughlin, Becky Renee,
• Place / Publishing House: Kalamazoo, MI : : Medieval Institute Publications, , [2020]; ©2020
• Year of Publication: 2020
• Language: English
• Series: Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture ; 25
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (VIII, 295 p.)

Beginning with the spectacle of hysteria, moving through the perversions of fetishism, masochism, and sadism, and ending with paranoia and psychosis, this book explores the ways that conflicts with the Oedipal law erupt on the body and in language in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, for Chaucer’s tales are rife with issues of mastery and control that emerge as conflicts not only between authority and experience but also between power and knowledge, word and flesh, rule books and reason, man and woman, same and other – conflicts that erupt in a macabre sprawl of broken bones, dismembered bodies, cut throats, and decapitations. Like the macabre sprawl of conflict in the Canterbury Tales, this book brings together a number of conflicting modes of thinking and writing through the surprising and perhaps disconcerting use of “shadow” chapters that speak to or against the four “central” chapters, creating both dialogue and interruption.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction, or A Long Preamble to a Tale -- Chapter 1: The Prick of the Prioress, or Hysteria and Its Humors -- Chapter 2: Portrait of the Hysteric as a Young Girl -- Chapter 3: Masochist as Miscreant Minister: The Parable of the Pardoner’s Perverse Performance -- Chapter 4: Confessing Animals -- Chapter 5: Before There Was Sade, There Was Chaucer: Sadistic Sensibility in the Tales of the Man of Law, the Clerk, and the Physician -- Chapter 6: Sadomasochism for (Neurotic) Dummies -- Chapter 7: The Reeve’s Paranoid Eye, or The Dramatics of “Bleared” Sight -- Chapter 8: Farting and Its (Dis)contents, or Call Me Absolon -- Chapter 9: Retractor -- Bibliography -- Index