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Dissertations

Barth, Emily. The Object of Affection: Metamorphosis and the Unbound Subject in Early Modern English Literature. Washington University in St. Louis, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2020. 27836693.

This project explores examples of metamorphoses in early modern English literature, and argues that metamorphosis becomes a means of affective expression for characters who are otherwise constrained. The Ovidian assault on the firm distinction between subject and object tells us something about affective life in the early modern world – and perhaps especially, if not exclusively, the affective life of early modern women.

My primary texts include Thomas Lodge’s Scillaes Metamorphosis and William Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece; Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book III Cantos 10-12, and Book IV through Canto 10; Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and John Lyly’s Woman in the Moon; Anne Cecil’s Pandora sonnets, and selections of Katherine Phillips’ and Mary Sidney’s poems. In considering these texts, I explore how radical changes respond to or incorporate violence as a core facet of the expression of subjectivity, and how such change may provide opportunities for affective communication. Because of the way the subject may be construed in early modern England, much of the literature grapples with the fine line separating subject from object, and the idea that it is not difficult to cross that line oneself through a deterioration of boundaries. This progression is always disruptive, though not necessarily negative. This dissertation is indebted to Julia Kristeva’s model of subjectivity as being consistently mutable and reflective of external reality. Kristeva’s essays hinge on “the turning points” that situate the individual in relation to community, and the porous boundaries between self and other. Signification is a necessary ingredient for the formation of a definite subject, but signification is unstable, particularly in poetic language.

What Kristeva describes is traumatic subject formation that can occur repeatedly. It is an ongoing process informed by external events that occurs “between social and asocial, familial and delinquent, feminine and masculine, fondness and murder.” Metamorphosis renders these interstitial spaces visible, and produces a mimetic image that reduces the subject to a singular object, undoing complex organizing fantasies of self and shattering inner cohesion. The Ovidian epyllia develop an idea of metamorphosis in which transformation is made available as an individual response, as it is for Scilla, whose originates in “The wondrous force of her untam’d desire,” an emotional pageant that culminates in her fusion with the shoreline in a demonstration of how she had become “enthrald” (118.6, 126.2). The tool that the epyllia develop has a mobility of its own, and becomes portable to other genres; so one can find the same sort of crying-out in Hermione’s statue, and in Anne Cecil’s lamentations: the drive toward ossification becomes also a drive toward emotional force.

Carter, Alexandra A. Romancing the Border in Early Modern England. Tufts University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2020. 27957722.

Romancing the Border in Early Modern England is an investigation of the methodological possibilities of reading the borderland in early modern English romance fiction from the late sixteenth to mid-seventeenth century. Reading prose, poetic, and dramatic texts from John Lyly, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and Margaret Cavendish, I trace the political and ideological significance of the border poetics that, I argue, prove foundational to romance. I argue that writing the nation in early modern England hinged upon writing the border, and that the romance genre proved to be particularly generative generic terrain for figuring the borderlands of England, Englishness, and emerging empire. Together, these chapters offer formalist readings of the geopolitical and ideological form of the border across early modern romance fiction.

Not only do romances in the period showcase a cartographic impulse to map the nation, but the genre also traverses the conceptual borderlands of the structuring binaries of English identity: self/Other, native/stranger, here/there. So, too, do the chapters of this dissertation move beyond geographic borderlands to investigate other types of borderlands. My first chapter, “Euphues, His England, and the Borders of Belonging,” considers linguistic borderlands by reading John Lyly’s prose romance, Euphues and His England, alongside early modern rhetorician John Puttenham’s theory of “Englishing,” or assimilating Latin and Greek rhetorical principles into vernacular English. My second chapter, “Border Crisis in Faeryland,” focuses on the parallels between the borders of early modern geopolitics (England/Ireland) and the borders of early modern gender politics (male/female) in Book 5 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. My third chapter, “Stranger Things: Cymbeline at the Borders of Empire,” considers the borderline figure of the stranger and offers a new framework for scholarly conversation of the play’s imperialism by calling attention to Cymbeline’s narrative and lexical investment in strangeness and strangers. My final chapter, “The New Science and the New Frontier for English Romance,” discusses cognitive borderlands in Margaret Cavendish’s writing by exploring the relationship between ignorance and knowledge at the beginning of the Scientific Revolution.

 

Collins, Allison Brigid. Reading the Lovesick Woman in Early Modern Literature. University of California, Los Angeles, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2020. 27829786.

In early modern Europe, love was not a feeling, but a physiological change in the body. In its extreme, love was lovesickness, a deadly disease. Love makes the patient a desiring subject who seeks to author his own experience. The disease raises the stakes: if he cannot fulfill his desire, he will die. Yet lovesickness decreases the subject’s agency because sickness makes the patient an object to be “read” and diagnosed by outside authorities. This paradox of increased agency and decreased control is particularly fraught when the patient is a woman. My dissertation analyzes the representation of lovesick women in early modern literature. While scholars have claimed lovesickness empowers women, I argue that the disease highlights the potential for female agency, but ultimately subjects women to external interpretation and control.

A lovesick patient’s body may speak for her through its symptoms, or she may voice desire. The first two chapters look at these two types of speech, with the first analyzing how narrators read lovesick female bodies and the second considering how women express lovesickness. Chapter one argues that in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Margaret Tyler’s The Mirror of Princely Deeds and Knighthood, and Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the narrators underscore the act of reading the lovesick woman. Lovesickness makes her body legible, and the narrators, in turn, interpret the value of her desire based on how it affects the narrator’s control. Chapter two turns to the lover’s voice, examining female lovesickness in Gaspara Stampa’s Rime and María de Zayas y Sotomayor’s Novelas amorosas y ejemplares and Desengaños amorosos. Both authors connect the disease to female authorship, with Stampa using it to grant her speaker authority/authorship and Zayas using the diagnosis as a misreading that the patient must correct in order to achieve authority. These texts show constant anxiety about how vulnerable women’s bodies and voices are to misreading; this anxiety recalls how the narrators in chapter one read and interpreted lovesick women as a way to maintain their control.

The last two chapters turn to how lovesickness is used to rewrite desiring bodies. Chapter three analyzes lovesickness as a mechanism of control in Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina and William Shakespeare’s As You Like It. In both texts, the disease enables female characters to seize interpretive control. In interpreting others, they also rewrite them, reshaping or creating desire. The texts cast doubt on the merits of this re-writing. The final chapter examines Shakespeare’s Two Noble Kinsmen, in which outside authorities exert interpretive control to justify an unsettling “cure.” Men misdiagnose the Jailer’s Daughter with lovesickness so they can impose their desired narrative upon her body. Love and lovesickness are separate: while female desire is positive and creative, its diagnosis as a disease leads to medical, masculine control and a bed trick tantamount to a rape. Desire no longer produces interpretive possibilities or competition for control; instead, control obliterates women’s agency and forecloses possibilities rather than creating them. 

The lovesick female body invites diagnosis, an act these texts compare to reading. To be diagnosed, read, and interpreted is to risk being misinterpreted and rewritten. The patient’s agency yields to the doctor’s control much like an author’s intentions become subject to a reader’s interpretation. This study of female lovesickness thus adds to gender studies and medical humanities, as well as to critical work on the history of authorship and readership.

 

McCants, Kristen Anne. Chivalric Animals: Affect, Animals, and Governance in Renaissance Romances. University of California, Santa Barbara, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2020. 27735619.

This dissertation explores a powerful convention of Renaissance romances: namely, that emotional interactions between humans and nonhuman animals have important consequences for the governance of the self and of others. Early modern romances offer significant, affect-laden interactions between humans and animals that test the boundaries and abilities of the governance of the self and of others, including human and nonhuman others. Animal encounters most often point to the moments in romances when characters find their self-control breaking, disturbing the hierarchical drive of romance to cement class differentiation by encouraging the ruling classes to maintain proper governance of their subjects. By evoking affective responses in the humans with whom they interact, emotional animals highlight fissures in the governance of the self and of others, as they disturb the notion of a person completely in control of his or her own emotions. In romances, emotional encounters with animals force humans to account for an other that reflects their own human affective landscapes in instrumental ways often troubling to those humans’ sense of self-control and social identity.

Chapter 1 begins with a short exploration of the emotional relationship between a knight and a water spaniel in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. It then contextualizes this dissertation in the fields of Renaissance romances, animal studies, affect theory, and scholarship on early modern governance. In Chapter 2, I probe the relationship between horsemanship manuals and theories of governance in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. This chapter centers on Guyon, the Knight of Temperance, and examines the theft and ultimate return of his horse Brigadore, as well as his encounter with allegorical figures who test his temperance. Chapter 3 places early modern hunting manuals in conversation with Mary Wroth’s prose romance, the Urania. Hunting scenes in the Urania are more than contests of wills between animals and humans; they become ways for Wroth to use human–animal encounters as emblems of the risky act of entering into emotional relationships with others. In Chapter 4, I turn to the philosophical and poetic works of Margaret Cavendish. After an initial discussion of how Cavendish’s philosophy reimagines animal emotion and cognition in opposition to Cartesian dualism, I turn to the animal poems in her Poems and Fancies, which imagine the real-world applications of her theories of the universe. Finally, I turn to The Blazing World as a romance in which her philosophical theories and her monarchist political thought intersect in the figures of the hybrid animal scientists that populate the Blazing World. In the Coda, I return to Spenser’s Faerie Queene and examine the cyborgian figure of Talus, Artegall’s robotic groom in Book V. Ostensibly a figure of emotionless justice, Talus subtly provokes a conversation about who—or what—can feel, and how to speak about that feeling. He looks forward to our continued obsession in modern times with romance narratives, as cyborgian new forms attempt to describe the best ways to live together as feeling beings in our more global universe.

 

Miller, Rachel A. Spenser’s Method of Grace in the Legends of Holiness, Temperance, and Chastity. Valdosta State University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2020. 27994366. 

The knights Redcrosse, Guyon, and Scudamour from The Faerie Queene are tasked with quests that curiously do not depend on wit or strength. Rather, the quests depend on each knight’s virtue and his acceptance of grace, the supreme virtue for Spenser. Through the wanderings of each knight, Spenser shows that there is a method of grace fashioned specifically for each knight’s quest both physical and spiritual that always requires the knights to reject false images of grace in exchange for God’s true grace. Grace will not abandon Gloriana’s knights, but as Guyon and Scudamour’s stubborn rejection of this virtue teaches, when grace is rejected, divine harmony, the loving cooperation between God and humanity that Redcrosse glimpses at the end of his quest, will be broken and replaced with fear and all the vices that follow it.

 

Mix Barrington, Julia Portia. Multitudinous Seas: Representations of the Ocean in Early Modern English Drama. Boston University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2020. 22621584.

This dissertation argues that early modern English writers represent the sea and tides as offering multiple, often contradictory spaces of risk and possibility. On page and stage, the ocean appears threatening and protective, liberating and confining, barren and fecund. Merchant vessels set sail to return with precious cargo, or to sink; royal children cast adrift either perish, or return unlooked-for; pirate crews elect a captain who may lead them to freedom, or to the gibbet; sea-storms divide families for the rest of their lives, or until a miraculous reunion; coastlines fortify island nations, or leave them vulnerable to attacking fleets. The sea furnishes an objective correlative for tempestuous grief, bottomless love, utter confusion, and myriad other states. As plot element and metaphorical vehicle, the literary sea opens multiple possibilities.

The first chapter argues that in history plays by Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Greene, the trope of England as an island fortified by the sea emphasizes not threatened British insularity, but rather hospitality, fortunate invasions, and continuity between Britain’s tidal rivers and its surrounding seas. The second chapter traces the security and vulnerability of maritime travelers from classical and medieval texts by Ovid, Virgil, Petrarch, Gower, and Chaucer to early modern romances by Greene, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Sidney through three key images: the storm-tossed ship, the rudderless boat, and the symmetrical shipwreck. The third chapter considers pirates in plays by Heywood and Rowley, Dekker, Daborne, and Shakespeare as representations of oceanic risk and contradiction. The fourth chapter analyzes gendered depictions of mythical sea creatures and deities in works by Shakespeare, Spenser, Dekker, Marlowe, and Lyly, arguing that while these authors use sea imagery to complicate traditional representations of gender, when they ascribe gendered qualities to the embodied sea, it is within the bounds of traditional gender roles. The final chapter discusses riches from the sea in texts by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Munday, and Spenser, demonstrating that before maritime wealth can be circulated economically or socially, it must undergo a land-change—a process of re-integration that frequently demands reversing the effects of sea-change.

 

Rodgers, Joel Thomas Nelson. Corporations and Early Modern Literature, 1580-1640.

University of Toronto (Canada), ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2020. 27666879. 

This dissertation is a study of the complex effects of early modern corporate culture on English literature at the turn of the seventeenth century, when modern conceptions of the corporation were first taking shape. Then, as now, corporations were an intermediary source of identity and agency that could extend, complement, or contravene the work of the nation-state. But in early modern England the corporation was a more versatile form than it is now. This elasticity produces a curious moment of potential not only for overlapping identities but also alternative forms of political imaginary. The literary writers examined here lived in an era when corporations threatened, enabled, and extended the emergent focus on the rights of the individual subject. Accordingly, each chapter offers a case study in one of four canonical authors — Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne, and Ben Jonson — demonstrating through careful reading of their works how they conceived of and responded to the corporation as a political form for imagining their own and others’ relationships to the emerging English nation-state.

The first two chapters focus on the figurative representation of the corporation as a discrete person. Chapter One recovers Spenser’s personification of an ancient Roman municipal corporation; this ancient form provides him with an ideal model for envisioning the English empire. Chapter Two then examines Shakespeare and his collaborators’ theatrical “personation” of a national corporation on stage, foregrounding the disjunctions between the imagined person and its embodiment in various representatives. The subsequent two chapters explore the ways early modern writers understood their personal and professional identities through the figurative lens of corporations. Chapter Three recovers Donne’s sense of “good company” as the nexus for his cosmopolitan connections to the political state and the world beyond. Chapter Four then demonstrates that Jonson’s anxious attempts to assert his independence from early modern corporate structures ultimately reinscribe these structures in his work. Overall, by recovering these complex early modern responses to corporate forms, these case studies defamiliarize our predominant sense of the corporation as a for-profit business enterprise and suggest historical alternatives in advance of the corporate relationships yet to come. 

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"Dissertations," Spenser Review (Fall 2020). Accessed March 29th, 2024.
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