New Medieval Literatures: Volume I by Wendy Scase (Geoffrey Shepherd Professor of Medieval English Literature, Geoffrey Shepherd Professor of Medieval English Literature, University of Birmingham)
New Medieval Literatures is a new annual of work on medieval textural cultures. It will provide a regular venue for innovative essays that deploy diverse methodologies - theoretical, archival, philological, and historicist - with an awareness of postmodernism. As well as featuring challenging new articles, each issue will include an analytical survey by a leading international medievalist of recent work in an emerging or dominant critical discourse. The editors, active in three continents and supported by a distinguished multidisciplinary Advisory Board, aim to engage with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages and now. The first volume, New Medieval Literatures 1, presents essays that destabilize the medieval text as a critical category. Interrogating period and literary boundaries, the contributors invoke bordercountry narratives, performance texts, self-consuming writing, and post-medievalist readers as they explore some of the most crucial topics in contemporary literary studies. Subjects discussed include vernacularity and political agency, pedagogic discourses, the textualization of authority, and the literary construction of cultural and social space. The volume as a whole demonstrates the central contribution of medievalists to 'the production of the present'. Future issues will include essays by Susan Crane, Simon Gaunt, Kantik Ghosh, Steven Kruger, Anne Middleton, Larry Scanlon, Helen Solterer,Robert Stein Jane Taylor and survey articles by Louise Fradenburg and Sarah Kay. Submissions for Volume 3 and subsequent issues may be sent to any of the editors.