Forms of Catastrophe

Abstract

This special issue considers how depictions of premodern catastrophe—environmental, social, political—shape and are shaped by literary form. The issue's introduction explores what form has to do with catastrophe and offers a case study of how form moves in a Middle English lyric about three fourteenth-century catastrophes: a revolt, a plague, and an earthquake. The six essays that follow approach the dynamics of catastrophic form in their own ways while sharing a set of assumptions about how catastrophe invites formal experimentation. Form, these essays agree, can manage or even contain the chaotic accumulation of catastrophe, as well as being a means of gesturing toward catastrophe's often inexpressible surplus. As literary forms depict catastrophe, they attempt to structure or manage disorder but in doing so often throw into relief their own fragility, their inability to contain what they aim to express. This collection of essays thus reflects on how forms not only represent but also embody catastrophe's continuities and discontinuities, its rhythms and ruptures, its order and disorder, and its anxieties, uncertainties, and possibilities.