Date of Award
2015
Document Type
Thesis
Department
English
First Advisor
Sarah Ensor
Subjects
Katherine Philips (1632-1664) -- Criticism and interpretation, English poetry -- Early modern (1500-1700) -- Criticism and interpretation
DOI
10.15760/honors.122
Abstract
Recent critics in early modern poetry, women’s literature, and queer studies have attempted to factor Katherine Philips’s friendship poetry into a history of homoerotic suspicion. Her metaphysical poems have been offered as a publically significant, potential erotics of textual, rather than physical, embodiment. This thesis responds by returning to the significance of the in-significance of textual representations of feminine erotics, as well as to earlier criticism of Philips as a poet of non-public life and chastity. An examination of notions of innocence in Philips’s configurations of friendship highlights an excess of innocence and a passion predicated on exception, restraint, and impossibility. Attention to Philips’s peculiar complicity with early modern misogynist discourses asks: what formulations of suspicion are activated by Philips, and the discourses themselves, rather than by our histories?
Persistent Identifier
http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/15450
Recommended Citation
Kramer, Rene, "That Mysterious, Remisse Knot: Katherine Philips's Unincorporated Fraternity" (2015). University Honors Theses. Paper 154.
https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/honorstheses/154
10.15760/honors.122
Comments
An undergraduate honors thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in University Honors and English