This study looks at dialogue and the rhetoric of space, place, and embodiment in writing by or attributed to early modern Englishwomen. The aim is to show how women speakers authorise their voices and identities through their verbal “positioning” of themselves relative to others. The strategies they employ include both the conventions of address that distinguish status among interlocutors and the imaginative evocation of how speakers occupy space. One premise of this project is the notion that the symbolic (including the verbal) and material levels of experience are bound closely together in the early modern imagination. Words could mean or make meaning on more than one level at once. This assumption helps us to see the way that subjects legitimate and “make room” for themselves through their representations of situated, embodied speakers and the boundaries and affiliations between them. The rhetorical manipulation of one’s “place”—both symbolically and materially—has often been overlooked as a significant feature of early modern texts, but deserves our attention as a useful strategy because identity was already conceptualised in these terms. They were woven into proverbial and official discourses that guided people’s understanding of self, society, and cosmos. Recent decades have seen an increasing critical interest in both the body and the material aspects of the culture in which early modern subjects come into being. As well, work continues to be done on gender and rhetoric in the period. My study brings together these two streams—embodied, “material” or “spatial” experience and the verbal details in texts—in a way that has not been fully explored. My focus on dialogue keeps the texts’ addressees in view, enabling us to understand that the “subject” emerges as part of a material, ideological, and discursive community, within which she creates connections and constructs protective boundaries. Further, this study considers an eclectic array of texts, bringing to light how diverse genres—early Protestant martyrology, pamphlet defences of women, selections of poetry, and drama—limit or enable women’s agency.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:MANITOBA/oai:mspace.lib.umanitoba.ca:1993/30199 |
| Date | 12 January 2015 |
| Creators | Glendinning, Lesley |
| Contributors | Owens, Judith (English, Film, and Theatre), Clark, Glenn (English, Film, and Theatre) Cossar, Roisin (History) Larson, Katherine (English, University of Toronto) |
| Source Sets | University of Manitoba Canada |
| Detected Language | English |
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