This dissertation investigates the symbolic presence of medieval forms of textual selfhood in early modern English Petrarchan poetry. Undertaking a systematic re-reading of a significant body of English Petrarchism through the prism of late medieval English poetry, it argues that medieval poetic texts inscribe in the vernacular literary imaginary (i.e. a repository of discursive forms and identities available to early modern writers through antecedent and contemporaneous literary utterances) a network of recognizable and iterable discursive structures and associated subject positions; and that various linguistic and ideological traces of these medieval discourses and selves can be discovered in early modern English Petrarchism. Each of the four chapters traces medieval genealogies of a distinct scenario of subjectivity deployed by English Renaissance Petrarchism. The first chapter considers the significance of William Langland???s poetics of meed (reward) for the anti-laureate and anti-courtly identities assumed by Thomas Wyatt in his Petrarchan poems and by Edmund Spenser in the Amoretti. The second chapter examines the persistence of vernacular melancholy (encapsulated in Geoffrey Chaucer???s Book of the Duchess) in the verse of Henry Howard, earl of Surrey and in Philip Sidney???s Astrophil and Stella. The poetics of melancholy engenders a fragmented subjectivity that manifests itself through a series of quasi-theatrical performances of identity, as well as an ambivalent form of poetic discourse in which the production of Petrarchism is carried out alongside its radical critique. The focus of chapter three is the master trope of royal incarceration and its function as a mechanism of subject formation in the poetry of James I Stewart, Charles of Orleans, Mary Stewart, and Lady Mary Wroth. As the dissertation argues, the figure of an imprisoned sovereign is a crucial ideologeme of the pre-modern English political and literary imaginary, underwriting the poetics and politics of royal identity from Sir John Fortescue to James VI/I. Lastly, the fourth chapter investigates medieval genealogies of the subject afflicted with a malady of desire in Shakespeare???s sonnets, by tracing its inchoate vernacular precedents back to the poems of Thomas Hoccleve (La Male Regle) and Robert Henryson (The Testament of Cresseid).

This study investigates the artistic expressions of women’s subjectivity in the prayer-poetry of Dorothee Sölle (1929-2003). My aim is to develop a critical introduction of Sölle’s poetry, in light of her theology and in conversation with literary theory, contextualising the reception of her work and the role of reception in subjectivity as these converge in her prayerful hermeneutic. In what I come to call “liturgical reception”, I provide a perspective on Sölle’s work on the basis of translations for an English speaking context. I draw on contemporary thought, ranging from feminism and liberation theology to hermeneutics, literary theory and philosophy, to shape the contour and scope of Sölle’s work. Addressing feminist debates that consider the role of gendered subjectivity in relation to pervasive hetero-normative structures, I facilitate Mary Gerhart’s notion of the “genric” and Luce Irigaray’s work on the “sexuate” to clarify the issues arising in Sölle’s poetry in the context of language and literature, as well as classic formulations of God and the Church. Thinking through gendered subjectivity allows liberation to emerge as a poetic process that opens up personal prayer for the wider community. In light of Sölle’s early comments on “Deprivatised Prayer” [1971], I argue for a theopoetic conception of prayer which takes the Death of God not as an end point, but as a starting point for a consciously critical negotiation of gendered faith identity in community. The conditions of the Death of God, to Sölle a sign for the loss of immediacy in the sense of naïveté (Ricoeur) – and therefore a loss of unproblematic intimacy – require prayer to take into account its gendered situation, since prayer is never not embodied. Sölle’s portrayals of woman-lover, mother and artist both rely upon and differentiate the relationship between emancipation and solidarity that I see addressed by liberation hermeneutics as the work of co-creation. Thus emerges a theopoetic vision that does not dissolve gender difference in favour of a “general” salvation, but offers a critique of the process of liberation itself tied into our gendered engagements with a theological reception of women at prayer.