{"product_id":"indecent-exposure-gender-politics-and-obscene-comedy-in-middle-english-literature-the-middle-ages-series","title":"Indecent Exposure: Gender, Politics, and Obscene Comedy in Middle English Literature (The Middle Ages Series)","description":"\u003cp\u003eWinner of the 2018 Best First Book Award from the Southeastern Medieval AssociationMen and women struggling for control of marriage and sexuality; narratives that focus on trickery, theft, and adultery; descriptions of sexual activities and body parts, the mention of which is prohibited in polite society: such are the elements that constitute what Nicole Nolan Sidhu calls a medieval discourse of obscene comedy, in which a particular way of thinking about men, women, and household organization crosses genres, forms, and languages. Inviting its audiences to laugh at violations of what is good, decent, and seemly, obscene comedy manifests a semiotic instability that at once supports established hierarchies and delights in overturning them.In Indecent Exposure, Sidhu explores the varied functions of obscene comedy in the literary and visual culture of fourteenth and fifteenthcentury England. In chapters that examine Chaucers Reeves Tale and Legend of Good Women; Langlands Piers Plowman; Lydgates Mumming at Hertford, Troy Book, and Fall of Princes; the Book of Margery Kempe, the Wakefield Second Shepherds Play; the Towneley Noah; and other works of drama, Sidhu proposes that Middle English writers use obscene comedy in predictable and unpredictable contexts to grapple with the disturbances that English society experienced in the century and a half following the Black Death. For Sidhu, obscene comedy emerges as a discourse through which writers could address not only issues of gender, sexuality, and marriage but also concerns as varied as the conflicts between Christian doctrine and lived experience, the exercise of free will, the social consequences of violence, and the nature of good government.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of Pennsylvania Press","offers":[{"title":"Sidhu, Nicole Nolan \/ hardcover","offer_id":47842213789941,"sku":"SONG081224804X","price":47.42,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/5804\/8501\/files\/61l2LPmb9zL.jpg?v=1773773141","url":"https:\/\/ergodebooks.com\/products\/indecent-exposure-gender-politics-and-obscene-comedy-in-middle-english-literature-the-middle-ages-series","provider":"Ergodebooks","version":"1.0","type":"link"}