The Singing Bone: Collective Creativity & the Creation of a Queer Imaginary
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Date
2021-04-27
Authors
Howard, Elizabeth
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
This dissertation examines how oral folklore and supernatural elements open to view queer ways of imagining in works by French writer Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy (1650-1705), Scottish poet James Macpherson (1736-1796), and Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf (1858-1940). Through their re-writing of supernatural stories from oral tradition, these authors articulate queer imaginaries that envision alternative configurations of identity and desire, in which eroticism expands beyond a binary framework, and in which equality is established between humans and nature. By reimagining oral materials in a literary form, these authors demonstrate the complexity of the interrelation between oral and literary texts and engage creativity as a collective rather than individual practice.
Each author’s marginalized position contributed to their use of popular genres (such as fairy tales, ballads, and folktales) to convey their critiques of the dominant culture in which they lived. All used the supernatural to reimagine the worlds they’d been excluded from. D’Aulnoy’s literary fairy tales emerged out of the oral context of the Parisian salons, and used the magical setting of the merveilleux to articulate political critiques of women’s position in seventeenth-century France. Through the transformations of her characters, D’Aulnoy’s tales illustrate new capacities for erotic attachment, queering heteronormative sexuality by expanding sensuality and desire beyond the human. In his Ossian poems, eighteenth-century Gaelic poet James Macpherson recreated the oral tradition of the Highland bards within a literary context. Through his evocation of Ossian as an intermediary with the dead, Macpherson’s poems convey a queer poetic imaginary in which the boundaries that separate humans from nature, and the living from the dead, are fluid. Nineteenth-century Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf reimagined storytelling traditions from her native Värmland in her novels to depict a liminal world, in which the boundaries between men and women, humans and nature, and the material and spiritual world, are constantly shifting. Through this examination of queer texts with roots in oral folklore, my project provides a theoretical model for recognizing this phenomenon in other literary works.
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Keywords
British Literature, Fantasy and Fantastic Literature, Folklore, French Literature, Queer Theory/Gender and Sexuality Studies, Scandinavian Literature