Meddle English

This book gathers a decade of Caroline Bergvall’s innovative pieces, from her long out-of-print performance text Goan Atom, inspired by the graphic contortions of Hans Bellmer’s Doll and violent love fantasies of other radical body-inspired artists, The Shorter Chaucer, a series of contemporary tales exploring social mores in a feisty mix of languages, and the hybrid and visual prose pieces Cropper, Cat in the Throat, and Middling English. This volume—rich, multi-layered, acerbic, humorous—creates a strong case for how new literature can provide speculative and performative excursions into post-urban lives and idoms and explore renewed visions for languages.