This thesis examines poetic representations of the male poet’s body and masculinity as a nexus for metapoetic reflections in the works of major Augustan Latin and Romantic English poets. Metapoetic moments—that is, moments in which a poem addresses its literariness, poetics, and/or authorial creator—can involve numerous semantic fields: sometimes engaging through punning and wordplay with contemporary critical idiom, but more typically operating suggestively with expressions that are imbued with further (metaphorical, metonymic, or allegorical) meaning which pertains to the poetry itself. Feminist studies of Latin love elegy have productively exposed how the bodies of female beloveds function simultaneously as the human object of the male poet’s erotic desire and—having been textually created, moulded, and assessed by the poet’s eroticised gaze—also as signifiers for negotiations of the poet’s compositions and his status in relation to his work. This thesis expands the scope and interpretative potential of such feminist readings of Latin love elegy in two mutually integrated ways: (a) by considering the explicit or oblique textual presence of the elegiac poet’s male body and masculinity as a hitherto overlooked site with metapoetic significance, analogous to that of female beloveds; and (b) by extending this critical perspective beyond ancient literature to the comparative-contrastive study of the same phenomenon in Romantic English poetry. Drawing on recent developments in masculinity studies, it elucidates how representations of the poet’s dissident masculinity, body, and sexuality relate to studied authors’ poetics, to contemporary literary discourses, and to poetic self-fashioning in both periods.
The body poetic: metapoetics, masculinity and the male body in Augustan Latin and romantic English poetry
Burke-Tomlinson, H. (Author). 1 Oct 2021
Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis › Doctor of Philosophy