Amorous toys and vain delights: Early modern prose romance tales and the uses of eroticism.
Item
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Title
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Amorous toys and vain delights: Early modern prose romance tales and the uses of eroticism.
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Identifier
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AAI9605581
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identifier
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9605581
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Creator
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Collins, Jane.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Patrick Cullen
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Date
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1995
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English | History, European | Literature, Modern
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Abstract
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Historians of the early modern period in England have consistently argued that changes in the economic system from feudalism to capitalism brought about an enormous pressure on the family system, marriage, and sexuality, transforming these aspects of culture, so they would better support the new economic order. This dissertation looks at prose romance tales as one of the cultural productions that were engaged in the process of renegotiating sexuality in early modern England. It examines the representations of female sexuality within the genre, the attacks on the genre, the uses for the genre described by the author and bookseller, and the audiences which were imagined for particular works within the genre.;The emerging popular audience for vernacular texts, which included women and non-aristocratic classes, created the prose romance as a place where the cultural meanings and the politics of sexual desire could be presented, contested, and policed. Each of my chapters addresses a different configuration of sexuality, love, and marriage and looks at how particular authors and audiences find the intersection of those terms useful for their social and political agendas. I examine four collections of prose romance tales--Geoffrey Fenton's Certain Tragical Discourses (1567), George Pettie's Petite Palace of Pettie His Pleasure (1576), Barnaby Riche's Farewell to Military Profession (1581), and George Whetstone's Heptameron of Civil Discourses (1582)--and find that as the nuclear family in the early modern period increasingly becomes a model for social order and hierarchy within early capitalism, female sexuality is correspondingly represented as contained within the bonds of marriage.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
