romance narratives
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2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-316
Author(s):  
Kayte Stokoe

Inspired by Judith Butler's conceptualization of drag as ‘gender parody’, I develop the conceptual frame of ‘textual drag’ in order to define and examine the relationship between parody, satire and gender. I test this frame by reading two seminal feminist works, Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) and Monique Wittig's Le Corps lesbien (The Lesbian Body) (1973). Both texts lend themselves particularly persuasively to analysis with this frame, as they each use parodic strategies to facilitate proto-queer satirical critiques of reductive gender norms. Orlando deploys an exaggerated nineteenth-century biographical style, which foregrounds the protagonist's gender fluidity and her developing critique of the norms and systems that surround her, while Le Corps lesbien rewrites canonical romance narratives from a lesbian perspective, challenging the heterosexism inherent in these narratives and providing new modes of thinking about gender, desire and sexual interaction.


Author(s):  
Rebecca Marsland

This chapter explores the importance of lament for the dead within historical and romance narratives composed in Scotland between c.1438 and c.1500 in both Older Scots and Latin. The chapter looks in detail at intercalated laments for the dead included in Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon (c.1440–7) and the anonymous Liber Pluscardensis (completed c.1461) as well as in the octosyllabic Buik of Alexander (c.1437), The Wallace (c.1476–8), and Sir Gilbert Hay’s Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour (c.1460–99). The chapter traces a persistent association within these texts between lament for the dead and physical rites of commemoration such as burial and the production of monuments, arguing that lament for the dead provides a means by which reputations can be authoritatively fixed.


Author(s):  
Alicia Walker

The social and cultural authority that images exercised in medieval Byzantium derived in part from their consistent observance of established traditions of representation. As a result of this tendency toward recognisable types, when an intentional departure from visual conventions was introduced, Byzantine viewers could be expected to notice the difference and wonder about the intentions behind it. This chapter explores how Graeco-Roman mythological and romance narratives offered opportunities for the engineering of amusing imagery through strategies of inversion and exaggeration. It focuses especially on how this up-ending of visual conventions served to disrupt the expected order of gender relations. The chapter shows how the programmes of middle Byzantine works of classicising art used humour initially to destabilize – but ultimately to reaffirm -- social norms surrounding female sexuality.


2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-158
Author(s):  
Claudia Bernardi

This article analyzes Rossana Campo’s Mentre la mia bella dorme (1999), Duro come l’amore (2005) and Il posto delle donne (2013) in the context of Campo’s work in general, showing how her use of crime genre conventions is specifically designed to reveal flaws and pitfalls inherent in romance narratives. By establishing a complex dialogue between noir and rosa, and by offsetting both traditions with female protagonists who question in different ways the heterosexual paradigm, Campo’s crime novels occupy a unique place in her production, especially in regard to the representation of female desire.


Author(s):  
Lynn Abrams

This chapter focuses on a neglected facet of Scottish men’s sense of self – the expression of intimacy and emotion in the context of one man’s letters home to his wife during an extended posting abroad in World War Two. Emotional openness, vulnerability, affection, devotion, romantic love and desire - these are not qualities commonly identified in the narratives of masculinity in Scotland in the twentieth century. The war provided the backdrop for a correspondence which allowed a serving soldier to explore his emotional side, and sustain his marriage, not only by consuming narratives of love but producing them too. Through a close examination of personal correspondence this chapter argues that this correspondent encapsulated a modern masculine self that Scottish men were to practice with greater confidence in the postwar decades.


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