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This study explores how romance opens the texts of two sixteenth-century authors. The first is the autobiography, Libro de la vida, of Spanish nun, mystic, and reformer, Santa Teresa de Jésus. Amidst the narrative of her life and her instructions on how to better live the mystical life, Teresa uses the mode of romance to construct herself and God in complicated and often conflicting roles: she the wandering (sinning) knight-errant who quests towards the ideal lady, Christ; she the walled garden into which her lover enters for fleeting moments of bliss; she the passive feminine recipient of God's forceful loves; she her own black knight, her own dark forest, through which she must fight to reach the throne of the Beloved. Reading Teresa in this light underscores the ways in which she deconstructs the sublimating, transcending, and bodiless love historically directed towards the God of the Western tradition to reveal a love fraught with mutability and painful separation. As God absents himself from her, mourning assails her and causes her to wish for death, the only bower that promises perfect proximity. In this conflicted realm of mortality in which she longs for death but must continue to live, Teresa moves past her desire into a space for faith. In the second text, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Spenser uses the capaciousness of the romance genre to express his desires for certain political, economical, and spiritual ends by constructing the Faerie Queene as a representative of Elizabeth I who in turn represents the potential for the realization of these hoped for ideals. The study focuses on one particular interchange between the Faerie Queene and the culturally-loaded icon of Arthur, and how Spenser imbues this moment with ambiguity, both posturing Arthur as the Queene's lover and her progenitor. The magical space of romance thus allows Spenser to simultaneously criticize, encourage, and praise Elizabeth, despite the inevitability that she will disappoint him. Despite disappointment, Spenser continues to strive for the temporal perfection of England, which ultimately leads him to an unyielding hope for the perfection of the immutable kingdom of heaven.

From the eighth to the fourteenth century, places of wonder and dread appear in a wide variety of genres in Old and Middle English: epics, lays, romances, saints’ lives, travel narratives, marvel collections, visions of the afterlife. These places appear in narratives of the other world, a term which in Old and Middle English texts refers to the Christian afterlife: Hell, Purgatory, even Paradise can be fraught with wonder, danger, and the possibility of harm. But in addition to the other world, there are places that are not theologically separate from the human world, but that are nevertheless both marvellous and horrifying: the monster-mere in Beowulf, the Faerie kingdom of Sir Orfeo, the demon-ridden Vale Perilous in Mandeville’s Travels, or the fearful landscape of the Green Chapel in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Fraught with horror or the possibility of harm, these places are profoundly different from the presented or implied home world of the text. My dissertation investigates how Old and Middle English narratives create places of wonder and dread; how they situate these places metaphysically between the world of living mortals and the world of the afterlife; how they furnish these places with dangerous topography and monstrous inhabitants, as well as with motifs, with tropes, and with thematic concerns that signal their marvellous and fearful nature. I argue that the heart of this poetics of marvellous spaces is displacement. Their wonder and dread comes from boundaries that these places blur and cross, from the resistance of these places to being known or mapped, and from the deliberate distancing between these places and the home of their texts. This overarching concern with displacement encourages the migration of iconographic motifs, tropes, and themes across genre boundaries and theological categories.

From the eighth to the fourteenth century, places of wonder and dread appear in a wide variety of genres in Old and Middle English: epics, lays, romances, saints’ lives, travel narratives, marvel collections, visions of the afterlife. These places appear in narratives of the other world, a term which in Old and Middle English texts refers to the Christian afterlife: Hell, Purgatory, even Paradise can be fraught with wonder, danger, and the possibility of harm. But in addition to the other world, there are places that are not theologically separate from the human world, but that are nevertheless both marvellous and horrifying: the monster-mere in Beowulf, the Faerie kingdom of Sir Orfeo, the demon-ridden Vale Perilous in Mandeville’s Travels, or the fearful landscape of the Green Chapel in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Fraught with horror or the possibility of harm, these places are profoundly different from the presented or implied home world of the text. My dissertation investigates how Old and Middle English narratives create places of wonder and dread; how they situate these places metaphysically between the world of living mortals and the world of the afterlife; how they furnish these places with dangerous topography and monstrous inhabitants, as well as with motifs, with tropes, and with thematic concerns that signal their marvellous and fearful nature. I argue that the heart of this poetics of marvellous spaces is displacement. Their wonder and dread comes from boundaries that these places blur and cross, from the resistance of these places to being known or mapped, and from the deliberate distancing between these places and the home of their texts. This overarching concern with displacement encourages the migration of iconographic motifs, tropes, and themes across genre boundaries and theological categories.

本文旨在闡明史賓塞如何架構出一則阿諦構和布烈特瑪間的完美愛情故事並鼓勵那些活在真實世界中的讀者跟隨這對戀人的腳蹤。本文首先介紹基督教中的愛論如何建基於神人之間完美的愛，並介紹史賓塞如何以神聖之愛為典範，寫出一對完美的愛人。藉此典範,史賓塞拆毀了兩座巨牆:他不但使人可以有完美的愛情，也使他的人物同時具有寓言和寫實兩大特性.此外、本文亦說明基督教愛論和其實現間的環狀關係如和使史賓塞的愛情故事和基督教的愛論亦產生環狀關係。第二、本文細探阿諦構和布烈特瑪間關係的發展、將之分為三個階段:為愛人、為夫妻、為朋友。在這三階段中、此愛情故事皆和基督教的愛論有環狀關係:此故事反映了神聖之愛的光華、釋明了神聖之愛的迷團、並藉著神聖之愛的特異處將此愛情故事中似乎不完美處解釋為完美。藉著探討史賓塞的愛情故事和基督教愛論彼此間的環狀關係、本文終能釐清史賓塞如何促使讀者基督教中認為人可以行出的貞潔。本文最後呈現史賓塞的環狀辯論如何鼓勵讀者不僅閱讀阿諦構和布烈特瑪的經驗、並能親身嘗試實行這對愛人的信念。 / This thesis aims at explaining how Spenser builds his love story of Artegall and Britomart as a perfect love model for all his readers in the real world to follow. The thesis first introduces how the Christian theory of love is modeled on the perfect love relation between God and human beings and how Spenser emulates that divine model and creates a pair of perfect human lovers. By his emulation of the divine model, he not only breaks down the middle wall between the perfect and the human, but also shapes his characters as both allegorical and realistic. Besides, the thesis also explains how the circular relationship between the Christian theory of love and its practice renders Spenser's artistic love model to have a circular relatioinship with theChristian love theory, too. Second, the argument of the thesis follows closely the development of Artegall and Britomart's relationship and divides it into three phases: their relationship as lovers, as husband and wife, as friends. In all the three phases, the love story has a circular relationship with the Christian theory oflove. It reflects the glory of a divine love model, explains the mystery of Christian love, and is justified of its seeming defects by the harshness andother-worldliness of the divine love. By laying bare of the circularrelationship between Spenser's love story and the Christian theory of love, the thesis finally comes to unravel Spenser's art of inviting the readers toperform chastity that human beings in Christian theory is supposed perform. Thethesis concludes by showing how the circular argument encourages the readers to join in Artegall and Britomart's experience and to practice their belief about love rather than simply to read it.

���In this thesis, I use modern concepts of feminism, gender performativity, and psychoanalysis as a means to understand female characters and authors of Renaissance England in a new way. In my first article, I analyze various texts and performances of Queen Elizabeth I, as well as texts of Renaissance female authors who are now slowly entering our modern canon ��� notably, Aemilia Lanyer. The second article is a feminist investigation of Britomart from Spenser's The Faerie Queene. In both pieces, I argue that these women (historical and fictional) broaden the definition of queer, and ultimately of feminism, as a whole. The goal of this thesis is to utilize published and visual records of early modern women writers and fictional characters, and apply a theoretical lens to such texts, in order to analyze these texts in a multi-faceted, contemporary fashion and to establish new modes of thought within the discourse of gender performativity, feminisms and psychoanalytical theory. / Graduation date: 2013

Young adult literature (YA) has been stereotypical in many of its portrayals of LGBTQ teens from the 1960s to the early 2000s, but three contemporary YA series--Cassandra Clare's The Mortal Instruments, Sarah Rees Brennan's Demons trilogy, and Holly Black's Modern Faerie Tales--indicate a change toward more nuanced characterizations. Using four categories--scriptedness, context, importance, and sexuality--to determine whether these representations of LGBTQ youth challenge or reiterate older tropes, my analysis indicates that YA has moved toward more complex representations of queerness, yet some normative discursive structures are still at work, such as poisonings or curses, supernatural parallels to coming out, and heteronormative humour. Although representations of queerness have diversified, then, the implicit ideologies in each author's portrayal of queerness demands closer attention.

This dissertation argues that in Renaissance discourses of the body the body is progressively evacuated of the spirit, as we move from texts of the late Medieval period to texts of the Jacobean period. Where New Historicists have suggested that the practice of “self-fashioning,” which dictates behaviour, speech and dress, takes place in the Renaissance, I argue that there was a material self-fashioning of the body occurring simultaneously. Such corporeal fashioning, motivated by desire for physical improvement, frustrates the extent to which the soul shapes the body. My Introduction lays theoretical and historical groundwork, situating the body/soul relationship in relation to Christian theology, Senecan-Stoicism, Epicureanism and philosophical materialism. Discourses of artistic creation, informed by neo-Platonism, also influence corporeal fashioning in that the most radical bodily modifications are imagined through literature, where artificers are often privileged as creators. Chapter One examines “The Miracle of the Black Leg,” a transplant, by the doctor-Saints Cosmas and Damian, of a Moor’s black leg to a white Sacristan, whose gangrenous leg is amputated. In written and pictorial representations Cosmas and Damian, initially figured as Saints, are later presented as doctors who perform a medical procedure. Alongside the doctors’ increasing agency, the black leg itself, inflected by Renaissance notions of Moors and Moorishness, troubles the soul’s immanence in the body. Chapter Two examines Elizabeth I’s practices of bodily fashioning through her wigs, dentures and cosmetics. I argue that Elizabeth’s symbolic value, which includes components of monarchical rule, as well as attitudes toward female beauty, is always already pre-empted by her body. In Book III of The Faerie Queene, moreover, Edmund Spenser writes an alternative history of England through Britomart’s body to provide an heir to Elizabeth’s otherwise heirless throne. Chapters Three and Four perform close readings of Book II of The Faerie Queene, Thomas Tomkis’s Lingua, Thomas Middleton’s The Maiden’s Tragedy and Revenger’s Tragedy, and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. I argue that both the allegorical and theatrical modes demand a level of materialism that paradoxically makes the body the centre of attention, and anticipates Cartesian mechanistic dualism. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2008-09-25 22:59:31.67

In his Book of the Courtier, Castiglione appeals to the Renaissance notion of self-fashioning, the idea that individuals could shape their identity rather than relying solely on the influence of external factors such as birth, social class, or fate. While other early modern authors explore the practice of self-fashioning—Niccolò Machiavelli, for example, surveys numerous princes identifying ways they have molded themselves—Castiglione emphasizes the necessity of modeling one's-self after a variety of sources, "[taking] various qualities now from one man and now from another." In this way, Castiglione advocates for a self-fashioning grounded in a discriminating kind of synthesis, the generation of a new ideal form through the selective combination of various source materials. While Castiglione focuses on the moves necessary for an individual to fashion himself through this act of discriminatory mimesis, his views can explain the ways authors of the period use source material in the process of textual production. As poets and playwrights fashioned their texts, they did so by consciously combining various source materials in order to create not individuals, as Castiglione suggests, but characters to represent new cultural ideals and values. Early moderns viewed the process of textual, as well as cultural production, as a kind of synthesis. Creation through textual fusion is particularly common in early modern accounts of the heroic, in which authors synthesize classical conceptions of the hero, which privilege the completion of martial feats, and Christian notions of the heroic, based on the contemplative nature of Christ. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how Thomas Kyd in The Spanish Tragedy (1585), Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene (1590), William Shakespeare in Titus Andronicus (1594), and John Milton in A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle (1632) syncretized classical and Christian notions of the heroic ideal in order to comment upon and shape political, social, and literary discourses. By recognizing this fusion of classical heroism with contemplative heroism, we gain a more nuanced understanding of the reception of classical ideas within an increasingly secular society.

By examining Renaissance criticism both literary and musical, framed in the context of the contemporaneous obsession with the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Horace, among others, this thesis identifies the parallels in poetic and musical practices of the time that coalesce to form a unified idea about the poet-as-singer, and his role in society. Edmund Spenser and John Milton, who both, in various ways, lived in periods of upheaval, identified themselves as the poet-singer, and comprehending their poetry in the context of this idea is essential to a fuller appreciation thereof. The first chapter addresses the role that the study of rhetoric and the power of oratory played in shaping attitudes about poetry, and how the importance of sound, of an innate musicality to poetry, was pivotal in the turn from quantitative to accentual-syllabic verse. In addition, the philosophical idea of music, inherited from antiquity, is explained in order elucidate the significance of “artifice” and “proportion”. With this as a backdrop, the chapters following examine first the work of Spenser, and then of Milton, demonstrating the central role that music played in the composition of their verse. Also significant, in the case of Milton, is the revolution undertaken by the Florentine Camerata around the turn of the seventeenth century, which culminated in the birth of opera. The sources employed by this group of scholars and artists are identical to those which shaped the idea of the poet-as-singer, and analysing their works in tandem yields new insights into those poems which are considered among the finest achievements in English literature.