Love Is in the Air: Reading Desire as Field in Hero and Leander
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Date
2022-10-04
Authors
Steinfeld, Vincent
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander presents rich opportunities for understanding early modern sexuality and emotions. In the poem, hyperbolic representations of desire between beings of varying ontological status convey a mechanics of interpersonal emotions alien to many modern conceptions of self-experience—namely those that view emotions as individuated, willed, and internal phenomena. In the poem, I argue, desire affects all kinds of beings in the form of an ambient field, creating an array of nonanthropocentric and nonheterosexual sexual encounters. Each encounter troubles the ways in which desire, seduction, and the fulfillment of pleasure often occur along predetermined socialized patterns. In this thesis I explore how Marlowe’s renderings of desire and seduction, while at times outlandish and hyperbolic, illustrate an underlying structure of emotion that is nonindividuated, external, and, ultimately, nonhuman.
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Keywords
Early Modern, Hero and Leander, Marlowe Christopher, Posthumanism, Queer Theory