Hysteria, Perversion, and Paranoia in “The Canterbury Tales”: “Wild” Analysis and the Symptomatic Storyteller

Hysteria, Perversion, and Paranoia in “The Canterbury Tales”: “Wild” Analysis and the Symptomatic Storyteller
ISBN-10
1501514067
ISBN-13
9781501514067
Category
History
Pages
303
Language
English
Published
2020-07-20
Publisher
Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Author
Becky Renee McLaughlin

Description

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.

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