This thesis explores the genre of Ovidian female-voiced complaint poetry and its tradition in early modern English literature. In looking at original poems, translations and receptions of Ovid’s Heroides, I argue that female as well as male writers throughout the early modern period engaged with the tradition of Ovidian female-voiced complaint poetry. By using case studies advancing chronologically throughout the period, I will also show how female-voiced complaint changes and develops in different historical and literary contexts. Nobody as yet has produced a study looking at a large sample of women writing female-voiced complaint. The criticism around complaint is diffuse, with only a small number of book-length studies which focus on complaint in general as a genre or discourse. There are many articles or chapters on individual complaint poems but not many which compare different female-voiced complaints of the same period, especially those written by women. When female poets write in the genre, the rhetorical trope of Ovidian female-voiced complaint (that the sex of the author is discontinuous with that of the speaker) must be renegotiated. This renegotiation by female poets is often the result of close and learned engagement with the traditions of complaint, both the classical precedents and the receptions and re-imaginations of the genre in early modern England. They are choosing a genre which has a productive potential in being female-voiced but which also has a tradition of male manipulation. However, rather than seeing women writers as existing separately from male writers, I argue that they work in parallel, drawing on the same Ovidian complaint traditions.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:731319 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Smith, Katherine Jo |
| Publisher | University of Warwick |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/95225/ |
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