This essay is focused on Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam, interpreting the poem against the background of a Petrarchan tradition. In this text I show how Tennyson’s work exhibits several parallels to the traditional elements of Petrarchism, both in terms of the themes it explores and of itsmore formal aspects. Among these commonalities are such things as a persistent focus on a distant object of affection, a sense of conflict or tension between earthly and divine love and a overall chronology and progression which ties the sequence together into an almost narrative structure. Besides these similarities, I also explore how In Memoriam differs from its Petrarchan model, andhow its differences are born of the particular circumstances in which it was written. Thus I also show how Tennyson manages to adapt an older literary tradition to the needs of his own time.

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This dissertation is a literary-historical study of Edmund Spenser’s under-rated sonnet sequence, Amoretti (1595), focusing on the poet’s playful manipulation of conventional imagery (largely Petrarchan) to reflect the progression of the poet/lover’s relationship with his beloved from the solipsistic to the interpersonal: that is, a relationship represented by variations on fixed erotic configurations to fluid, interactive conversations involving attitudes, understanding and emotion. Without denying the ultimately serious purpose of the sonnets, the study concentrates on the light-heartedness of the presentation, advertised as a “sporting” interlude in the midst of the composition of Spenser’s major work, The Faerie Queene. Not primarily ideological in focus, but rather of a critical evaluative kind, the work entails a systematic and comprehensive analysis of imagery concerning weaving, captivity and eyes within the Amoretti in three contexts: the genre of the Elizabethan sonnet sequence, Spenser’s other works and the Renaissance propensity for experiment or play of mind.

Thesis (M.A.)--Bowling Green State University, 2009. / Document formatted into pages; contains v, 39 p. : col. ill. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis advisor: Mary T. Crane / Thesis advisor: Caroline Bicks / <italic>Disappearing Acts</italic> interrogates the concept of Petrarchism and the role of the Petrarchan mistress in early modern England. Critics from the early modern period onward have viewed Petrarchism as limiting to women, arguing that it obstructs female agency. This view stems from a long history of trying to establish the parameters of Petrarchism itself, a body of literature whose inchoate nature makes it difficult to define. <italic>Disappearing Acts</italic> takes as its starting point the instability of Petrarchism, embracing the ways in which it functions as a discourse without boundaries, whose outlines are further blurred by its engagement with other genres, forms, and contexts. Examining the intersections between Petrarchism and other early modern discourses&mdash;religious, political, theatrical, humanist, romantic&mdash;illuminates the varied ways in which the role of the mistress is deployed in early modern literature and suggests that, as a term, the &ldquo;Petrarchan mistress&rdquo; loses the coherence that critics often impose on it. Rarely ever entirely there or entirely missing, the figure of the mistress instead signifies an unstable, liminal role that results in far more complex representations of women. This project emphasizes the complexities of the Petrarchan mistress and examines this figure as a performative role that is negotiated rather than simply inhabited as a prison. Each chapter traces the intersections between Petrarchism and another early modern discourse in England. Chapter One examines the overlap between Reformist language and Petrarchan language, particularly in the &ldquo;absent presence&rdquo; of the Eucharist and the female beloved. I argue that the elusive persona of the Protestant martyr Anne Askew is produced by the conjunction of Petrarchan and Reformist discourses. Chapter Two interrogates the relationship between the theory of the king&rsquo;s two bodies and the concept of the Petrarchan female double, pairing Edmund Spenser&rsquo;s <italic>Faerie Queene</italic> with the writings of Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. I suggest that female queens of the sixteenth century both secured and imperiled their authenticity by comparing themselves to a false version. Chapter Three examines the relationship between Petrarchism and the figure of the ghost in early modern England. I consider Shakespeare&rsquo;s <italic>The Winter&rsquo;s Tale</italic> in relation to the female complaint, a popular genre appended to sonnet sequences in which a ghost complains about her fate, and I argue that Shakespeare&rsquo;s evocation of ghostliness enables Hermione to return from her immobilized position to perform a Pertrarchan role in which she can speak her own desires. Chapter Four reexamines Mary Wroth&rsquo;s character, Pamphilia, as two different characters produced by two different genres: one by the prose romance <italic>The Countess of Montgomery&rsquo;s Urania</italic> and one by the sonnet sequence <italic>Pamphilia to Amphilanthus</italic>. While the Pamphilia of the sonnets proclaims her constancy, the Pamphilia of the romance exposes the tensions produced by the varied historical uses of the term in discourses from martyrology to stoicism. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Thesis--Münster i. Westf. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. [5]-8).

Esta pesquisa apresenta um breve estudo sobre a vida e a obra da escritora renascentista italiana Gaspara Stampa e descreve a recepção de sua obra no Brasil, contribuindo para os futuros estudos sobre a autora em nosso país. / This research presents a short study about the life and work of the Italian Renaissance writer Gaspara Stampa and describes the reception of her work in Brazil, contributing to future studies of the author in our country

Esta pesquisa apresenta um breve estudo sobre a vida e a obra da escritora renascentista italiana Gaspara Stampa e descreve a recepção de sua obra no Brasil, contribuindo para os futuros estudos sobre a autora em nosso país. / This research presents a short study about the life and work of the Italian Renaissance writer Gaspara Stampa and describes the reception of her work in Brazil, contributing to future studies of the author in our country

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).