Bodies in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene: the Gestalt of male subjectivity and female subjection

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1995
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Abstract
This thesis interrogates the constitution of male "subjectivity" in its historical context between its subsumption by medieval discourses that reify corporate experience and the emergence of late Renaissance "individuality." The Faerie Queene, acutely aware of the inversion of gender power relations in its epideictic project, participates in the conceptual accrual of male subjective agency. The process is one in which the need to contain and shape representations of Elizabeth as a woman also reveals the radical operations by which male "subjectivity" is gained. A Neoplatonic gestalt suffused with Gnostic and Pauline abjection of the body natural at one pole and an ineffable realm evocative of the Platonic "idea" and Christian God at the other becomes the underlying structure by which gender representations come to shape ascendant subjective masculinity through the denunciation and subjection of femaleness.
Description
Bibliography: p. 115-124.
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Citation
Stone, T. (1995). Bodies in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene: the Gestalt of male subjectivity and female subjection (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/22623
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