Megan Moore - Böcker

Drawing upon literary, historical, and visual evidence, this collection of interdisciplinary essays examines how the Mediterranean shaped practices of gender in the premodern era. This volume bridges the gap between gender studies and Mediterranean studies, which have a natural fit with each other in their interest on defining identity carefully through connectivity and attentiveness to cultural hegemonies. The essays in this volume build off of this double approach to offer a unique contribution to the field, and use gender to understand the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean to understand premodern gender.Whereas other volumes have examined gender in the premodern period or premodern Mediterranean Studies, to date no other volume has sought to explore the intersection of the two.  The interdisciplinary nature of the essays will make them useful to both scholars and teachers, for they will combine theory and practice in a length that makes them easily accessible to advanced students as well as specialized researchers. The first chapter provides a critical overview of the scholarship on Mediterranean studies as a field of area studies as well as an overview of gender studies in the medieval period. As such, the volume will be useful for students, teachers, and researchers, and its interdisciplinary nature reflects the diaspora of the Mediterranean itself.

The Routledge History of Love in World Literature and Culture offers a wide-ranging, global rethinking of romantic love. Bringing together scholars from across continents and disciplines, the volume shows how love is imagined, practiced, and contested in different cultural, historical, and political contexts, challenging the idea that love follows a single, universal script.The collection examines representations of eros across Africa, East Asia, the Middle East, South Asia, Europe, and the Americas, spanning medieval texts to contemporary novels, film, television, visual art, and theatre. Well-known case studies include So Long a Letter, The God of Small Things, The Arabian Nights, The Forty Rules of Love, as well as works by Olive Schreiner, Gabriel García Márquez, Louise Erdrich, and modern Chinese and Japanese fiction. Rather than treating love as timeless or purely personal, contributors show how it is shaped by gender, religion, colonial histories, nationalism, technology, ecology, and changing social norms. The volume explores transgressive, queer, feminist, posthuman, and more-than-human forms of love, revealing love as a powerful force that both sustains and unsettles communities.Designed as an accessible and digestible reference, the essays broaden understanding of the cultural politics of emotions for scholars and students in literary and cultural studies, world literature, gender studies, film studies, posthumanism, and the humanities more broadly. It offers a landmark contribution to the study of emotions and global culture for research and teaching alike.

Charting important new territory within medieval gender studies, Megan Moore explores the vital role that women played in transmitting knowledge and empire within Mediterranean cross-cultural marriages. Whereas cross-cultural exchange has typically been understood through the lens of male-centered translation work, this study, which is grounded in the relations between the west and Byzantium, examines cross-cultural marriage as a medium of literary and cultural exchange, one in which women's work was equally important as men’s.  Moore's readings of Old French and Medieval Greek texts reveal the extent to which women challenged the cultures into which they married and shaped their new courtly environments. Through the lens of medieval gender and postcolonial theory, Exchanges in Exoticism demonstrates how the process of cultural exchange – and empire building – extends well beyond our traditional assumptions about gender roles in the medieval Mediterranean.

The Erotics of Grief considers how emotions propagate power by exploring whose lives are grieved and what kinds of grief are valuable within and eroticized by medieval narratives. Megan Moore argues that grief is not only routinely eroticized in medieval literature but that it is a foundational emotion of medieval elite culture. Focusing on the concept of grief as desire, Moore builds on the history of the emotions and Georges Bataille's theory of the erotic as the conflict between desire and death, one that perversely builds a sense of community organized around a desire for death. The link between desire and death serves as an affirmation of living communities. Moore incorporates literary, visual, and codicological evidence in sources from across the Mediterranean—from Old French chansons de geste, such as the Song of Roland and La mort le roi Artu and romances such as Erec et Enide, Philomena, and Floire et Blancheflor; to Byzantine and ancient Greek novels; to Middle English travel narratives such as Mandeville's Travels. In her reading of the performance of grief as one of community and remembrance, Moore assesses why some lives are imagined as mattering more than others and explores how a language of grief becomes a common language of status among the medieval Mediterranean elite.