Description
Book SynopsisEssays on the post-modern reception and interpretation of the Middle Ages, with a particular focus on its relationship with business and finance. In the wake of the many passionate responses to its predecessor, Studies in Medievalism 22 also addresses the role of corporations in medievalism. Amid the three opening essays, Amy S. Kaufman examines how three modern novelists have refracted contemporary corporate culture through an imagined and highly dystopic Middle Ages. On either side of that paper, Elizabeth Emery and Richard Utz explore how the Woolworth Company and Google have variously promoted, distorted, appropriated, resisted, and repudiated post-medieval interpretations of the Middle Ages. And Clare Simmons expands on that approach in a full-length article on the Lord Mayor's Show in London. Readers are then invited to find other permutations of corporate influence in six articles on the gendering of Percy's Reliques, the Romantic Pre-Reformation in Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth, renovation and resurrection in M.R. James's "Episode of Cathedral History", salvation in the Commedia references of Rodin's Gates of Hell, film theory and the relationship of the Sister Arts to the cinematic Beowulf, and American containment culture in medievalist comic-books. While offering close, thorough studies of traditional media and materials, the volume directly engages timely concerns about the motives and methods behind this field and many others inacademia. Karl Fugelso is Professor of Art History at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland. Contributors: Aida Audeh, Elizabeth Emery, Katie Garner, Nickolas Haydock, Amy S. Kaufman, Peter W. Lee, Patrick J. Murphy, Fred Porcheddu, Clare A. Simmons, Mark B. Spencer, Richard Utz.
Table of ContentsEditorial Note - The Corporate Gothic in New York's Woolworth Building: Medieval Branding in the Original "Cathedral of Commerce" - Elizabeth Emery Our Future is Our Past: Corporate Medievalism in Dystopian Fiction - Amy S. Kaufman The Good Corporation? Google's Medievalism and Why It Matters - Richard Utz "Longest, oldest, and most popular": Medievalism in the Lord Mayor's Show - Clare A Simmons Gendering Percy's Reliques: Ancient Ballads and the Making of Women's Arthurian Writing - Katie Garner Romancing the Pre-Reformation: Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth - Mark B. Spencer Renovation and Resurrection in M. R. James's "Episode of CathedralHistory" - Patrick J. Murphy and Fred Porcheddu Rodin's Gates of Hell and Dante's Inferno 7: Fortune, the Avaricious and Prodigal, and the Question of Salvation - Aida Audeh Film Theory, the Sister Arts Tradition, and the Cinematic Beowulf - Nickolas Haydock Red Days, Black Knights: Medieval-themed Comic Books in American Containment Culture - Peter W. Lee
