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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Theatres Of War: Performing Queer Nationalism In Modernist Narratives, Elise Swinford
Theatres Of War: Performing Queer Nationalism In Modernist Narratives, Elise Swinford
Doctoral Dissertations
Queer writers in Britain during the early twentieth century found themselves in a fraught geopolitical context formed by imperial violence and the First World War. In this dissertation, I argue that many queer modernist artists employed performative strategies in order to navigate the increasingly narrow vision of WWI-era British national culture that accompanied this historical context. While performance allowed them to express queer politics and desires without risking total exposure and persecution, their performative aesthetic depended on a problematic use of racial tropes through which these desires were channeled. By attending to moments of national and gendered performances in the …
Prosthetizing The Soul: Reading, Seeing, And Feeling In Seventeenth-Century Devotion, Katey E. Roden
Prosthetizing The Soul: Reading, Seeing, And Feeling In Seventeenth-Century Devotion, Katey E. Roden
Doctoral Dissertations
My dissertation proposes a new context for reading early modern devotional writing’s rich engagement with the language of the body in its focus on the relationship between gendered representations of devotional desire and spiritual ability in the religious poetry of seventeenth-century England. By tracing how somatic speech and bodily conditions are portrayed in the devotional poetry of John Milton, Richard Crashaw, Thomas Traherne, and An Collins, this project examines how these writers fashion spiritual states through the language of a sometime sorrowful and sometime ecstatic, but always desiring body. My project reveals how early modern authors manipulate or respond to …