English | ISBN: 0823294757 | 2021 | 144 pages | PDF | 1094 KB

Why did Saint Augustine ask God to "circumcise[his] lips"? Why does Sir Gawain cut off the Green Knight's head on the Feast of the Circumcision? Is Chaucer's Wife of Bath actually―as an early glossator figures her―a foreskin? And why did Ezra Pound claim that he had incubated The Waste Land inside of his uncut member? In this little book, A. W. Strouse excavates a poetics of the foreskin, uncovering how Patristic theologies of circumcision came to structure medieval European literary aesthetics. Following the writings of Saint Paul, "circumcision" and "uncircumcision" become key terms for theorizing language―especially the dichotomies between the mere text and its extended exegesis, between brevity and longwindedness, between wisdom and folly.
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