Subterranean Archives: Surfacing Resilience in the Middle Ages

In Subterranean Archives, I propose a method of ecocritical inquiry called “speluncular reading” that asks what kind of stories surface from underground in literary texts. Rather than treating subterranean spaces as metaphors or allegories, I bring together feminist, critical race, disability, and queer theories alongside ecocritical and new materialist approaches to read caves as agential bodies that challenges us to reconsider the stories of the women, monsters and marginalized beings who are made to inhabit subterranean spaces. As homes to the culturally sidelined, underground chambers are sites of risk in which women are forced into concubinage, racial groups are immobilized, and figures of questionable human status suffer environmental illness. However, as they become co-extensive with their inhabitants, I argue that caves amplify the voices and stories of women, aid in the development of unique bodily capacities, thereby allowing for new perspectives in medieval disability theory, and engender queer ecological desires. What surfaces from below are new readings of well-tread medieval texts including the Roman d’Eneas, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, The Book of John Mandeville, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Author

• Montroso, Alan S

Language

• en

Keyword

• race
• monster
• feminism
• ecocriticism
• queer ecology
• disability

Date created

• 2019

Type of Work

• Dissertation

License

• All rights reserved

Rights statement

• In Copyright

GW Unit

• English

Degree

• Ph.D.

Advisor

• Hsy, Jonathan

Committee Member(s)

• Alaimo, Stacy
• Joubin, Alexa A
• Mitchell, David T
• Cohen, Jeffrey J

Persistent URL

•  https://scholarspace.library.gwu.edu/etd/cz30pt33k