Tison Pugh

L. Frank Baum's Trans Tales and Other Astounding Adventures in Sex and Gender

Queer Oz

Angela Jane Weisl

"From Harry Potter and Robin Hood, through to video games and jousting-themed restaurants, medieval culture continues to surround us and has retained a strong influence on literature and culture throughout the ages. This fascinating and illuminating guide is written by one of the leading contemporary scholars of Medieval literature, and explores: - The influence of medieval cultural concepts on key authors such as Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, George Eliot and Mark Twain - The continued appeal of medieval cultural figures such as King Arthur and Robin Hood - The influence of the medieval on disciplines such as politics, music, film, and art. Medievalisms surveys the critical field and sets the boundaries for future study, providing an essential background for literary study from the Medieval period through to the twenty-first century"--

Making the Past in the Present

Medievalisms

Harry Potter and Beyond explores J. K. Rowling's beloved best-selling series and its virtuoso reimagining of British literary traditions. Weaving together elements of fantasy, the school-story novel, detective fiction, allegory, and bildungsroman, the Harry Potter novels evade simplistic categorization as children's or fantasy literature. Because the Potter series both breaks new ground and adheres to longstanding narrative formulas, readers can enhance their enjoyment of these epic adventures by better understanding their place in literary history. Along with the seven foundational novels of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and Beyond assesses the extraordinary range of supplementary material concerning the young wizard and his allies, including the films of the books, the subsequent film series of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the theatrical spectacle Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and a range of other Potter-inspired narratives. Beyond the world of Potter, Pugh surveys Rowling's literary fiction The Casual Vacancy and her detective series featuring Cormoran Strike, written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. Through this comprehensive overview of Rowling's body of work, Pugh reveals the vast web of connections between yesteryear's stories and Rowling's vivid creations.

On J. K. Rowling's Fantasies and Other Fictions

Harry Potter and Beyond

Lynn Ramey

Teaching Games and Game Studies in the Literature Classroom offers practical suggestions for educators looking to incorporate ludic media, ranging from novels to video games and from poems to board games, into their curricula. Across the globe, video games and interactive media have already been granted their own departments at numerous larger institutions and will increasingly fall under the purview of language and literature departments at smaller schools. This volume considers fundamental ways in which literature can be construed as a game and the benefits of such an approach. The contributors outline pedagogical strategies for integrating the study of video games with the study of literature and consider the intersections of identity and ideology as they relate to literature and ludology. They also address the benefits (and liabilities) of making the process of learning itself a game, an approach that is quickly gaining currency and increasing interest. Every chapter is grounded in theory but focuses on practical applications to develop students' critical thinking skills and intercultural competence through both digital and analog gameful approaches.

Teaching Games and Game Studies in the Literature Classroom

What is the difference between a star born in the South and a “southern star”? In Southerners Acting Southern, Tison Pugh answers this intriguing question, pondering the ways in which some performers from the South metamorphose into southern stars by accentuating their geographic and cultural roots as key aspects of their star personas. Many celebrities, particularly actors, seek to transcend their hometown roots in favor of achieving an “all-American” appeal, but some stars born in the South build their national and international fan base by emphasizing the southern aspects of their biography and by leaning into regional clichés and stereotypes that percolate throughout the U.S. cultural imaginary. In turn, some southern stars trot out the region’s hoariest tropes of fading belles, gullible country rubes, and the succors of southern hospitality only to reveal the shallowness of these stereotypes and of their celebrity personas as well. Covering more than one hundred years of cultural history, Southerners Acting Southern allows readers to gauge the South’s often-reluctant progress into modernity, including discussions on the intersection of race and celebrity for the region’s Black stars and its increasing, if hesitant, embrace of queer ones. Chapters feature a wide-ranging selection of southern celebrities, including Louis Armstrong, Truman Capote, Elvis Presley, Tennessee Williams, Andy Griffith, Tina Turner, Dolly Parton, Tom Petty, Gloria Estefan, Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Jenna Bush Hager, Ellen DeGeneres, Tyler Perry, Matthew McConaughey, Aziz Ansari, and Miley Cyrus. Southerners Acting Southern moves from past to present, from musicians to media personalities, discerning the ways in which southernness contributes to the building of personal celebrity. Altogether, this luminous work of cultural criticism reveals that southern stargazing, as much as it might initially appear a flighty pastime of overzealous fans, divulges deeper truths about the South, and the United States as a whole, that might otherwise pass unnoticed.

On Celebrities and Their Star Personas in the Imagined South

Southerners Acting Southern

This Approaches to Teaching volume aims to provide students with a vision of Chaucer that highlights the great variety, breadth, and depth of his entire body of work. Although Chaucerians recognize that Troilus and Criseyde and the shorter poems are as entertaining and complex as the more familiar Canterbury Tales, teachers of medieval English do not readily include these texts in their courses. The materials collected here offer instructors ideas and strategies for making Chaucer's lesser-taught works as memorable and engrossing for students as any of the narrative gems in Canterbury Tales. Part 1, "Materials," discusses available teaching resources, focusing not only on the many editions of Chaucer's works in Middle English but also on translations for teachers whose students turn to modern English as a study aid. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," begin by exploring the poetry's backgrounds, including sources and genre; the growth of the English vernacular as a literary language; Chaucer's conception of history in its Christian, classical, and English political senses; the role of manuscript study in illuminating the historical record; and Chaucer's representation of gender. The section on teaching the poems features essays that offer suggestions for overcoming students' difficulties with Middle English, consider the relation between Chaucer and his readers, assess various theoretical models, and show how a wide range of visual imagery can be used in the classroom. A final section on course contexts includes essays on teaching these poems for the first time, as well as designing classes for nonmajors and graduate students. The volume concludes with an appendix on reading Chaucer aloud with students.

Approaches to Teaching Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and the Shorter Poems

Marcia Smith Marzec

New studies of the problem of medieval masculinity, and Chaucer's treatment of it. Issues relating to the male characters and the construction of masculinities in Chaucer's masterpiece of love found and love lost are explored here. Collectively the essays address the question of what it means to be a man in theMiddle Ages, what constitutes masculinity in this era, and how such masculinities are culturally constructed; they seek to advance scholarly understanding of the themes, characters, and actions of Troilus and Criseyde through thehermeneutics of medieval and modern concepts of manliness. Throughout, they argue that Troilus and the other characters, including Criseyde, are subject to multiple and conflicting interpretations, especially in regard to the intersections of their genders with their sexual performances and their conflicted relationships to generic expectations for gendered conduct. Contributors: JOHN M. BOWERS, MICHAEL CALABRESE, HOLLY A. CROCKER, KATE KOPPELMAN, MOLLY MARTIN, MARCIA SMITH MARZEC, GRETCHEN MIESZKOWSKI, JAMES J. PAXSON, TISON PUGH, R. ALLEN SHOAF, ROBERT S. STURGES, ANGELA JANE WEISL, RICHARD ZEIKOWITZ

Men and Masculinities in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde

"Within the realm of U.S. culture and its construction of its citizenry, geography, and ideology, who are Southerners and who are queers, and what is the South and what is queerness? Queering the South on Screen addresses these questions by examining "the intersections of queerness, regionalism, and identity" depicted in film, television, and other visual media about the South during the twentieth century. From portrayals of slavery to gothic horror films, the contributors show that queer southerners have always expressed desires for distinctiveness in the making and consumption of visual media. Read together, the introduction and twelve chapters deconstruct premeditated labels of identity such as queer and southern. In doing so, they expose the reflexive nature of these labels to construct fantasies based on southerner's self-identification based on what they were not"--

Queering the South on Screen

Susan Aronstein

For many, the middle ages depicted in Walt Disney movies have come to figure as the middle ages, forming the earliest visions of the medieval past for much of the contemporary Western (and increasingly Eastern) imagination. The essayists of The Disney Middle Ages explore Disney's mediation and re-creation of a fairy-tale and fantasy past, not to lament its exploitation of the middle ages for corporate ends, but to examine how and why these medieval visions prove so readily adaptable to themed entertainments many centuries after their creation. What results is a scrupulous and comprehensive examination of the intersection between the products of the Disney Corporation and popular culture's fascination with the middle ages.

A Fairy-Tale and Fantasy Past

The Disney Middle Ages

Tison Pugh examines the intersection of narratology, ludology, and queer studies, pointing to the ways in which the blurred boundaries between game and narrative provide both a textual and a metatextual space of queer narrative potential. By focusing on these three distinct yet complementary areas, Pugh shifts understandings of the way their play, pleasure, and narrative potential are interlinked. Through illustrative readings of an eclectic collection of cultural artifacts--from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to Nintendo's Legend of Zelda franchise, from Edward Albee's dramatic masterpiece Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter fantasy novels--Pugh offers perspectives of blissful ludonarratology, sadomasochistic ludonarratology, the queerness of rules, the queerness of godgames, and the queerness of children's questing video games. Collectively, these analyses present a range of interpretive strategies for uncovering the disruptive potential of gaming texts and textual games while demonstrating the wide applicability of queer ludonarratology throughout the humanities.

Chaucer's Losers, Nintendo's Children, and Other Forays in Queer Ludonarratology

How is history even possible, since it involves recapturing a past already lost? It is through this urge to understand, feel and experience, that films based on medieval history are made. They attempt to re-create the past, but can only do so through a queer re-visioning that inevitably replicates modernity. In these mediations between past and present, history becomes misty, and so, too, do constructions of gender and sexuality leading to the impossibility of heterosexuality, or of any sexuality, predicated upon cinematic medievalism. Queer Movie Medievalisms is the first book of its kind to grapple with the ways in which mediations between past and present, as registered on the silver screen, queerly undercut assumptions about sexuality throughout time. It will be of great interest to scholars of Gender and Sexuality, Cultural and Media Studies, Film Studies and Medieval History.

Queer Movie Medievalisms

The tragic sentiment of Southern literature and its heteronormative perspective are foundational attributes generally accepted by both popular and scholarly audiences. Yet a pantheon of great authors ranging from like Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, and Truman Capote to present-day voices of Alice Walker, John Waters, and David Sedaris, collectively attest to both the vibrancy of queer experience and the prevalence of humor found in this rich regional cannon. In Precious Perversions: Humor, Homosexuality, and the Southern Literary Canon, Tison Pugh challenges the premises that elevate William Faulkner and diminish Florence King, that esteem Walker Percy yet marginalize David Sedaris, by arguing for the inclusion of gay comic authors as long-standing, defining voices in the field. By redefining the tenets of Southern literature Pugh reveals long-overlooked or discounted aspects of gay humor within the South's literary realm. Noting, for example, that Tennessee Williams is revered as a dramatist who probes the heart of the human condition rather than for his submerged camp humor, and Truman Capote's comic cinema and literature never eclipsed serious works, Pugh establishes a history of mainstream and academic critique that ignored queer humor. Likewise, Florence King and Rita Mae Brown wrote defining narratives of Southern lesbian experience in, respectively, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady and Rubyfruit Jungle, yet, according to Pugh, they are almost entirely neglected in accounts of the literary South. More recently, the author shows, the critical reception of Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina testifies to an overarching interest in the traumatic aspects of her poetry and fiction rather than in her humor and its cathartic power. Pugh also asserts that David Sedaris, as a writer of the "post-Southern South," who appears to fall beyond the parameters of regional literature for many readers, creates a new, humorous vision of the region that recognizes both its pained history and its grudging accession to modernity. Drawing from works of key southern writers Pugh sets forth a new vision of Southern literature emerges -- one illuminated by the humor of gay voices no longer at the margins.

Humor, Homosexuality, and the Southern Literary Canon

Precious Perversions

For the U.S. South, the myth of chivalric masculinity dominates the cultural and historical landscape. Visions of white southern men as archetypes of honor and gentility run throughout regional narratives with little regard for the actions and, at times, the atrocities committed by such men. In Queer Chivalry, Tison Pugh exposes the inherent contradictions in these depictions of cavalier manhood, investigating the foundations of southern gallantry as a reincarnated and reauthorized version of medieval masculinity. Pugh argues that the idea of masculinity -- particularly as seen in works by prominent southern authors from Mark Twain to Ellen Gilchrist -- constitutes a cultural myth that queerly demarcates accepted norms of manliness, often by displaying the impossibility of its achievement. Beginning with Twain's famous critique of "the Sir Walter disease" that pilloried the South, Pugh focuses on authors who questioned the code of chivalry by creating protagonists whose quests for personal knighthood prove quixotic. Through detailed readings of major works -- including Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Flannery O'Connor's short fiction, John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, Robert Penn Warren's A Place to Come To, Walker Percy's novels, and Gilchrist's The Annunciation -- Pugh demonstrates that the hypermasculinity of white-knight ideals only draws attention to the ambiguous gender of the literary southern male. Employing insights from gender and psychoanalytic theory, Queer Chivalry contributes to recent critical discussions of the cloaked anxieties about gender and sexuality in southern literature. Ultimately, Pugh uncovers queer limits in the cavalier mythos, showing how facts and fictions contributed to the ideological formulation of the South.

Medievalism and the Myth of White Masculinity in Southern Literature

Queer Chivalry

This fascinating collection explores America's appropriations and fabrications of the Middle Ages, revealing the nation's complicated love affair with a past it never had, but has created from history and imagination.

United States of Medievalism

Keith S. Folse

Greater Essays uses more challenging models and assignments to give students opportunities to further develop their essay writing and vocabulary skills.

Greater Essays

The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom examines the evasive depictions of sexuality in domestic and family-friendly sitcoms. Tison Pugh charts the history of increasing sexual depiction in this genre while also unpacking how sitcoms use sexuality as a source of power, as a kind of camouflage, and as a foundation for family building. The book examines how queerness, at first latent, became a vibrant yet continually conflicted part of the family-sitcom tradition. Taking into account elements such as the casting of child actors, the use of and experimentation with plot traditions, the contradictory interpretive valences of comedy, and the subtle subversions of moral standards by writers and directors, Pugh points out how innocence and sexuality conflict on television. As older sitcoms often sit on a pedestal of nostalgia as representative of the Golden Age of the American Family, television history reveals a deeper, queerer vision of family bonds.

The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom

Within the realm of American culture and its construction of its citizenry, geography, and ideology, who are southerners and who are queers, and what is the South and what is queerness? Queering the South on Screen addresses these questions by examining the intersections of queerness, regionalism, and identity depicted in film, television, and other visual media about the South during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Southern queers on screen often reflect the fantasy of cultural stereotypes. Editor Tison Pugh contends that when southern queers appear in films and on television, and when southern queers watch these portrayals, the inherent contradictions of these cultural depictions reveal the fault lines of gender, geography, and desire. These underlying schisms point to the infinite, if infrequently portrayed, possibilities of actual queer southern life. Examining a range of materials, including gothic horror films and drag queens on public-access television, the contributors show that queer southerners have always expressed desires for distinctiveness in the making and consumption of visual media. Read together, the introduction and twelve chapters deconstruct premeditated labels of identity such as queer and southern. In doing so, they expose the reflexive nature of these labels to construct ideological fantasies of southerners regardless of the complexity of their lives.

Tison Pugh examines the intersection of narratology, ludology, and queer studies, pointing to the ways in which the blurred boundaries between game and narrative provide both a textual and a metatextual space of queer narrative potential. By focusing on these three distinct yet complementary areas, Pugh shifts understandings of the way their play, pleasure, and narrative potential are interlinked. Through illustrative readings of an eclectic collection of cultural artifacts—from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda franchise, from Edward Albee’s dramatic masterpiece Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter fantasy novels—Pugh offers perspectives of blissful ludonarratology, sadomasochistic ludonarratology, the queerness of rules, the queerness of godgames, and the queerness of children’s questing video games. Collectively, these analyses present a range of interpretive strategies for uncovering the disruptive potential of gaming texts and textual games while demonstrating the wide applicability of queer ludonarratology throughout the humanities.

Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children’s Literature examines distinguished classics of children’s literature both old and new—including L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, and Stephenie Meyer’s 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’s literature typically endorses heterosexuality through its invisible presence as the de facto sexual identity of countless protagonists and their families, yet heterosexuality’s ubiquity is counterbalanced by its occlusion when authors shield their readers from forthright considerations of one of humanity’s most basic and primal instincts. The book demonstrates that tensions between innocence and sexuality render much of children’s 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's literature and representations of children's sexuality. Tison Pugh is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Central Florida. He is the author of Queering Medieval Genres and Sexuality and Its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature and has published on children’s literature in such journals as Children’s Literature, The Lion and the Unicorn, and Marvels and Tales.

Tison Pugh

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