A01=A. W. Strouse
Author_A. W. Strouse
Category=DSBB
Category=JBSJ
Category=NHDJ
Category=QRAX
Category=QRM
Chaucer
Circumcision
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
foreskin
medieval
poetry
queer theory
Saint Augustine
Saint Paul
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
theology
Product details
- ISBN 9780823294749
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 13 Apr 2021
- Publisher: Fordham University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Why did Saint Augustine ask God to "circumcise [his] lips"? Why does Sir Gawain cut off the Green Knight's head on the Feast of the Circumcision? Is Chaucer's Wife of Bath actually—as an early glossator figures her—a foreskin? And why did Ezra Pound claim that he had incubated The Waste Land inside of his uncut member? In this little book, A. W. Strouse excavates a poetics of the foreskin, uncovering how Patristic theologies of circumcision came to structure medieval European literary aesthetics. Following the writings of Saint Paul, "circumcision" and "uncircumcision" become key terms for theorizing language—especially the dichotomies between the mere text and its extended exegesis, between brevity and longwindedness, between wisdom and folly. Form and Foreskin looks to three works: a peculiar story by Saint Augustine about a boy with the long foreskin; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale. By examining literary scenes of cutting and stretching, Strouse exposes how Patristic treatments of circumcision queerly govern medieval poetics.
A.W. Strouse is a poet and an adjunct professor of medieval literature, as well as the author of many scholarly articles, poems, and art projects.
