Sexuality and the Contours of the Self in Early Modern English Verse
| dc.contributor.advisor | Saunders, Ben | |
| dc.contributor.author | Filo, Gina | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2021-11-23T15:30:48Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2021-11-23 | |
| dc.description.abstract | “Sexuality and the Self” argues against conventional views of early modern subjects as anxious about possible breakdowns of self effected by sexual encounters, showing instead how sex’s potential to radically alter the self was often actively sought out. Early moderns understood body and self as mutually implicated, literally fluid, and highly unstable. This self is always in flux and at risk of collapse; its claim to identity categories like its gender or humanity is also contingent in this model. This instability has led many scholars to claim that sex—a paradigmatically boundary-blurring activity—was inherently anxious in the period. In this construction, writers try to reassert difference after moments of sexual blurring in their texts, anxiously recuperating the individual and categorical integrity sex threatens. However, I argue that this account of early modern sexual formations elides the clear pleasure many texts take in articulating breakdowns of selves, of gendered forms, and of human bodies in sex. By reading Shakespeare, Donne, Herrick, Marvell, Crashaw, and Traherne, I show how poets exploit the language of erotic self-shattering to imagine unbounded forms of self and self-other relations, rejecting hierarchical divisions of gender and species to imagine diffuse forms of sex, self, and sociality. These poets, I argue, constitute an important yet overlooked body of early modern sexual thought. The dissertation demonstrates how writers leverage the language of eroticism to negotiate relationships with other, different, beings. It explores how poetic representations of sex transform relationships of self and other; male and female; human, plant, and animal; and human and God. It also shows how critical beliefs about erotic normativity lead us to overlook or reject the apparent strangeness of many of the period’s canonical texts. And, finally, it recaptures some of the delight, the playfulness, and the pleasure these texts take—and offer—in reimagining sexuality and the self. | en_US |
| dc.description.embargo | 2023-10-11 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1794/26898 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | |
| dc.publisher | University of Oregon | |
| dc.rights | All Rights Reserved. | |
| dc.subject | Early Modern English Literature | en_US |
| dc.subject | Early Modern Poetry | en_US |
| dc.subject | Gender and Sexuality | en_US |
| dc.subject | Metaphysical Poetry | en_US |
| dc.subject | Queer Theory | en_US |
| dc.subject | Selfhood | en_US |
| dc.title | Sexuality and the Contours of the Self in Early Modern English Verse | |
| dc.type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | Department of English | |
| thesis.degree.grantor | University of Oregon | |
| thesis.degree.level | doctoral | |
| thesis.degree.name | Ph.D. |
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