This book addresses a little-considered aspect of the study of the history of emotions in medieval literature: the depiction of perplexing emotional reactions. Medieval literature often confronts audiences with displays of emotion that are improbable, physiologically impossible, or simply unfathomable in modern social contexts. The intent of such episodes is not always clear; medieval texts rarely explain emotional responses or their motivations. The implication is that the meanings communicated by such emotional display were so obvious to their intended audience that no explanation was required. This raises the question of whether such meanings can be recovered. This is the task to which the contributors to this book have put themselves. In approaching this question, this book does not set out to be a collection of literary studies that treat portrayals of emotion as simple tropes or motifs, isolated within their corpora. Rather, it seeks to uncover how such manifestations of feeling may reflect cultural and social dynamics underlying vernacular literatures from across the medieval North Sea world.

"Suburban Pornography" is contemporary literature, which documents Canadian urban life in a raw and naked manner. The prose is stripped--minimalist, direct, urgent, unflinching. The stories revolve around ordinary characters and problems--people stuck in bad relationships or jobs. Some yearn for something just beyond their grasp, something authentic to knock them out of their malaise. Their frailties and obsessions are front and centre. They are garbage men, bus drivers, waitresses, soup kitchen clients, and neighbourhood perverts--tired and busy, too weary to contemplate--from social conditions that sanction only mere existence in redemption's agony and fleeting glory.

Fiction. This collection continues Firth's deep mining into the bowels of Canadian life. From there he unearths tales of forgotten people who survive with their wits and guts during these harsh times. Behind the covers of SHAG CARPET ACTION are stories about rival garbage collectors warring over a possible strike; suburban lust and yearning involving the creative use of a son's Spider-Man toy; the travails of a man who has a vasectomy but then finds out there are far more painful events to deal with on his agenda; shameless and bombastic people who just don't care who overhears their conversation--and on it goes. These are absurd, raunchy, funny stories whose sharp, salty characters are boldly credible and wonderfully rendered by one of Canada's most adventurous and courageous fiction writers.