عنوان

The Function of the Rhetoric of Maternity in the Representation of Female Sexuality, Religion, Nationality, and Race in Early Modern English Literature and Culture

Number

TLpq2405652849

.Language of Text, Soundtrack etc

انگلیسی

Title Proper

The Function of the Rhetoric of Maternity in the Representation of Female Sexuality, Religion, Nationality, and Race in Early Modern English Literature and Culture

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Morales, Cecilia

Subsequent Statement of Responsibility

Schoenfeldt, Michael C.

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

University of Michigan

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2020

Specific Material Designation and Extent of Item

270

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

Ph.D.

Body granting the degree

University of Michigan

Text preceding or following the note

2020

Text of Note

This dissertation tracks the use of maternal rhetoric in the literature and culture of early modern England and reveals how maternity intervenes in complex cultural and political conversations throughout the period. It shows how maternity impacts (and is impacted by) English attitudes and understandings of gender, sexuality, race, nationality, religion, and the natural world across the seventeenth century. The title of the introduction, Defining Maternity, plays with the notion that maternity is both a concept that is defined by a host of historically contingent factors as well as a politically potent, malleable rhetoric that gives definition to readers' values as they encounter a text. For example, in Salve Deus ex Judaeorum, Aemilia Lanyer invokes maternity - particularly the rhetoric of maternal pain and suffering - to buttress not only her authority as a female writer but also her unique intervention into the moment's Protestant poetics. In Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, the ambivalence that surrounds maternity in the early modern period structures readers' ambivalent response to Egyptianness. Examining maternal rhetoric in Shakespeare's play reveals the multiple strategies the early modern English deployed to elevate English nationalism by selectively incorporating and rejecting Egyptian culture. Aphra Behn's Oroonoko uses maternal rhetoric to describe not only the human body of Imoinda but also the nonhuman plant and animal bodies of Surinam. Portraying Imoinda in parallel with these nonhuman reproducing bodies opens a critique of English exploitation of enslaved subjects and the foreign ecologies that they colonize. Finally, Maternity plays a key role in shaping readers' erotic experience of three canonical whore dialogues - The School of Venus, Venus in the Cloister, and A Dialogues between a Married Woman and a Maid - highlighting the sexual knowledge and experience that is frequently erased from representations of maternity. When maternal rhetoric appears in these texts, it invokes and manipulates readers' expectations for women's sexual behavior, adding nuance to the paradoxical assumption that "good" mothers are asexual.

Early Modern England

Maternity

Nationality

Race

Rhetoric

Womens studies

Morales, Cecilia

Schoenfeldt, Michael C.

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y