Abstract
My research relocates Sappho’s poetry in the history of sexuality as it intersects with literature, by focusing on the relationship between Sapphic poetics and reader-response.Historicising interpretations of eroticism commonly determine how Sappho’s poetry is placed in the history of sexuality, as an ancient example of female homoeroticism. However, the crypto-biographical assumption that the author’s persona is always ‘in’ Sappho’s erotic fragments eclipses their striking tendency towards ungendered language and anonymity. Thus, the first chapter reorients our focus from Sapphic persona to poetics, showing that the author’s predominant absence coincides with the consistent omission of contextualising social information about lover and/or beloved, even where homoeroticism is unambiguous. Concurrently, rather than identifying a particular sexuality in the text, Sapphic poetics provokes audiences and readers to imagine various erotic possibilities.
What variety of viable interpretations around sexuality is made possible by Sapphic poetics? Moreover, on this basis, what counts as ‘Sapphic’ sexuality? A comparative reader-response approach illuminates both questions in studying creative Sapphic receptions by the Roman poet Catullus, the American trans author Daniel M. Lavery, and British gay activist Maureen Duffy. These reader-writers, firstly, dramatize contrasting ways in which ambiguities in Sappho’s poetry can be concretised in reception. They thereby help isolate distinct meanings of ‘Sapphic’: although their receptions are all ‘Sapphic’ by responding to Sappho, their style is (mostly) not ‘Sapphic’ in the sense of being sexually ambiguous like Sappho’s poetry. Secondly, they dramatize both moments drawn from the process of reading Sappho, and also the personal aftermath of concretising certain possibilities. They thereby show that a variety of sexual identities may be considered ‘Sapphic’ in the senses of drawing from and following after close interactions with Sapphic poetics. Thus, a range of ‘Sapphic’ sexualities, all made possible by Sapphic poetics, emerges, disrupting a tendency to equate ‘Sapphic’ with what is (only) ‘lesbian.’
Having shown that ‘Sapphic’ is defined by multiple relationships to Sappho and her fragments, it emerges that conceptions of Sapphic traditions unduly privilege relationships to the poet over the poetry. For example, although Wittig self-styles as ‘Sapphic’ qua Sappho’s descendent, her novel, The Lesbian Body, is not like Sappho’s fragments, because it does not guide readers to respond in the same way as Sappho’s fragments. Consequently, writing ‘like Sappho’s poetry’ is frequently neglected and excluded from how Sapphic traditions are framed. Remedying this, I draw out a ‘Sapphic mode’ of writing in Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body, which guides readers to adopt the same intimate ‘reading positions,’ and to self-reflect consciously in the text’s gaps, as Sappho’s poetry does. Thus, I rethink ‘the Sapphic’ to centre what is ‘like Sappho’s poetry,’ which helps us rethink how we create and curate Sappho’s legacy and trans-historical significance for the history of literature and sexuality.
The conclusion considers the interdisciplinary ramifications of relocating Sappho’s poetry in the history of sexuality via a reader-response methodology and the newly conceived ‘Sapphic mode.’ By locating the text’s meaning in the interaction between text and reader, the thesis contributes to classics, classical reception, queer and comparative studies, and the history of sexuality, while also drawing together these distinctive approaches.
| Date of Award | 1 Jan 2023 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Justine McConnell (Supervisor) & Sebastian Matzner (Supervisor) |