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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
"In Loving Virtue": Staging The Virgin Body In Early Modern Drama, Miranda Viederman
"In Loving Virtue": Staging The Virgin Body In Early Modern Drama, Miranda Viederman
Honors Projects
The aim of this Honors project is to investigate representations of female virginity in Renaissance English dramatic works. I view the period as one in which the womb became the site of a unique renewal of cultural anxieties surrounding the stability of the patriarchy and the inaccessibility of female sexual desire. I am most interested in virginity as a “bodily narrative” dependent on the construction and maintenance of performance. I analyze representations of virginity in female characters from four works of drama originating in the Jacobean period of the English Renaissance, during and after the end of the reign of …
"Proud Flesh And Blood": Phineas Fletcher, Gabriel Daniel, And Seventeenth-Century Theories Of Embodiment, Micaela Elanor Simeone
"Proud Flesh And Blood": Phineas Fletcher, Gabriel Daniel, And Seventeenth-Century Theories Of Embodiment, Micaela Elanor Simeone
Honors Projects
The human body was a site of discovery and redefinition in early modern Europe. This project traces the gradual arc from the mid-seventeenth century towards Cartesian notions of the body in the later part of the century through two fictions: Phineas Fletcher (1582-1650)’s The Purple Island (1633) and Gabriel Daniel (1649-1728)’s Voyage du Monde de Descartes (1690). This project views these two largely-overlooked texts as important literary works that represent the seventeenth century’s transformative debates about and explorations of the human body. I argue that Fletcher employs a dissective mode that embraces mind-body harmony while framing the human as both …