The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom

The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom explores how the fantasies of genre, marketing, and children can never fully cloak the queerness lurking within the plucky families designed for American viewers’ comic delight. Queer readings of family sitcoms demolish myths of yesteryear, demonstrating the illusion of American sexual innocence in television’s early programs and its lasting consequences in the nation’s self-construction, as they also allow fresh insights into the ways in which more recent programs negotiate new visions of sexuality while indebted to previous narrative traditions. Tison Pugh thoroughly explores six specific family sitcoms to illustrate how issues of sexuality intersect with other critical concerns of their respective periods and cultures

Jews in Medieval England: Teaching Representations of the Other

This volume examines the teaching of Jewishness within the context of medieval England. It covers a wide array of academic disciplines and addresses a multitude of primary sources, including medieval English manuscripts, law codes, philosophy, art, and literature, in explicating how the Jew-as-Other was formed. Chapters are devoted to the teaching of the complexities of medieval Jewish experiences in the modern classroom. Jews in Medieval England: Teaching Representations of the Other also grounds medieval conceptions of the Other within the contemporary world where we continue to confront the problematic attitudes directed toward alleged social outcasts.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/books/1039/thumbnail.jp

“Falseness Reigns in Every Flock”: Literacy and Eschatological Discourse in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381

The literature of the Peasants\u27 Revolt of 1381, a miscellany of fourteenth-century poetry and prose penned before, during, and after the insurrection, often stresses the importance of literacy to the nonaristocratic population of England. Since literacy was a primary marker of one’s social status in the stratified society of medieval England, the rise of literacy in the lower orders pointed to a dramatic change in the prevail- ing socioeconomic structure. In the literature of the revolt, eschatological themes highlight the tensions resulting from this tremendous upheaval in the traditional estates. The power of literacy is depicted as adumbrating a new social order free from class division; these themes of revolution are reinforced by eschatological motifs, including the prevalence of falsehood, God’s judgment of his enemies, the beginnings of war, and the appearance of natural disasters such as famine and earthquakes. The eschatological thematics of the Peasants’ Revolt literature reflect the insurrectionists’ conviction that, unless the inequities of England’s economic caste system were ameliorated, God’s judgment was at hand; these eschatological motifs also evince the poets’ concerns with the ideological, political, and social ramifications of literacy. We can see in these writings a twin concern with literacy and eschatology predicated upon the spread of dissident thought and the society’s reaction to these ideas

Innocence Heterosexuality And The Queerness Of Children\u27S Literature

Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children\u27s Literature examines distinguished classics of children\u27s literature both old and new-including L. Frank Baum\u27s Oz books, Laura Ingalls Wilder\u27s Little House series, J. K. Rowling\u27s Harry Potter novels, Lemony Snicket\u27s A Series of Unfortunate Events, and Stephenie Meyer\u27s Twilight series-to explore the queer tensions between innocence and heterosexuality within their pages. Pugh argues that children cannot retain their innocence of sexuality while learning about normative heterosexuality, yet this inherent paradox runs throughout many classic narratives of literature for young readers. Children\u27s literature typically endorses heterosexuality through its invisible presence as the de facto sexual identity of countless protagonists and their families, yet heterosexuality\u27s ubiquity is counterbalanced by its occlusion when authors shield their readers from forthright considerations of one of humanity\u27s most basic and primal instincts. The book demonstrates that tensions between innocence and sexuality render much of children\u27s literature queer, especially when these texts disavow sexuality through celebrations of innocence. In this original study, Pugh develops interpretations of sexuality that few critics have yet ventured, paving the way for future scholarly engagement with larger questions about the ideological role of children\u27s literature and representations of children\u27s sexuality