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 in academia.
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.
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