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Pure Filth : Ethics, Politics, and Religion in Early French Farce / Noah D. Guynn.

By: Material type: TextTextSeries: The Middle Ages SeriesPublisher: Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2019]Copyright date: ©2020Description: 1 online resource (272 p.) : 2 illusContent type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780812251685
  • 9780812296495
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 842.0523 23
LOC classification:
  • PQ584 .G89 2020eb
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources:
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- A Note on Sources -- Introduction. The Many Faces of Farce -- Chapter 1. The Wisdom of Farts: Ethics and Politics, Farce and Festive Comedy -- Chapter 2. A Justice to Come: Messianism and Eschatology in Maistre Pierre Pathelin -- Chapter 3. Sacraments and Scatology, Faith and Doubt: Andrieu de La Vigne’s Mystère de Saint Martin and Its Farces -- Chapter 4. Making History: Misbehaved Women, Well-Behaved Women, and the Sexual Politics of Farce -- Afterword. Against Protoforms -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index -- Acknowledgments
Summary: As Noah D. Guynn observes, early French farce has been summarily dismissed as pure filth for centuries. Renaissance humanists, classical moralists, and Enlightenment philosophes belittled it as an embarrassing reminder of the vulgarity of medieval popular culture. Modern literary critics and theater historians often view it as comedy's poor relation—trite, smutty pap that served to divert the masses and to inure them to lives of subservience. Yet, as Guynn demonstrates in his reexamination of the genre, the superficial crudeness and predictability of farce belie the complexities of its signifying and performance practices and the dynamic, contested nature of its field of reception. Pure Filth focuses on overlooked and occluded content in farce, arguing that apparently coarse jokes conceal finely drawn, and sometimes quite radical, perspectives on ethics, politics, and religion.Engaging with cultural history, political anthropology, and critical, feminist, and queer theory, Guynn shows that farce does not pander to the rabble in order to cultivate acquiescence or curb dissent. Rather, it uses the tools of comic theater—parody and satire, imitation and exaggeration, cross-dressing and masquerade—to address the urgent issues its spectators faced in their everyday lives: economic inequality and authoritarian rule, social justice and ethical renewal, sacramental devotion and sacerdotal corruption, and heterosocial relations and household politics. Achieving its subtlest effects by employing the lewdest forms of humor, farce reveals that aspirations to purity, whether ethical, political, or religious, are inevitably mired in the very filth they repudiate.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9780812296495

Frontmatter -- Contents -- A Note on Sources -- Introduction. The Many Faces of Farce -- Chapter 1. The Wisdom of Farts: Ethics and Politics, Farce and Festive Comedy -- Chapter 2. A Justice to Come: Messianism and Eschatology in Maistre Pierre Pathelin -- Chapter 3. Sacraments and Scatology, Faith and Doubt: Andrieu de La Vigne’s Mystère de Saint Martin and Its Farces -- Chapter 4. Making History: Misbehaved Women, Well-Behaved Women, and the Sexual Politics of Farce -- Afterword. Against Protoforms -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index -- Acknowledgments

restricted access online access with authorization star

http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

As Noah D. Guynn observes, early French farce has been summarily dismissed as pure filth for centuries. Renaissance humanists, classical moralists, and Enlightenment philosophes belittled it as an embarrassing reminder of the vulgarity of medieval popular culture. Modern literary critics and theater historians often view it as comedy's poor relation—trite, smutty pap that served to divert the masses and to inure them to lives of subservience. Yet, as Guynn demonstrates in his reexamination of the genre, the superficial crudeness and predictability of farce belie the complexities of its signifying and performance practices and the dynamic, contested nature of its field of reception. Pure Filth focuses on overlooked and occluded content in farce, arguing that apparently coarse jokes conceal finely drawn, and sometimes quite radical, perspectives on ethics, politics, and religion.Engaging with cultural history, political anthropology, and critical, feminist, and queer theory, Guynn shows that farce does not pander to the rabble in order to cultivate acquiescence or curb dissent. Rather, it uses the tools of comic theater—parody and satire, imitation and exaggeration, cross-dressing and masquerade—to address the urgent issues its spectators faced in their everyday lives: economic inequality and authoritarian rule, social justice and ethical renewal, sacramental devotion and sacerdotal corruption, and heterosocial relations and household politics. Achieving its subtlest effects by employing the lewdest forms of humor, farce reveals that aspirations to purity, whether ethical, political, or religious, are inevitably mired in the very filth they repudiate.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 25. Jun 2024)