Celibate pleasures: convents, asexuality, and women's agency in British literature, 1660-1760

Cole, Megan Elizabeth

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Description

Title

Celibate pleasures: convents, asexuality, and women's agency in British literature, 1660-1760

Author(s)

Cole, Megan Elizabeth

Issue Date

2023-06-22

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Nazar, Hina

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Nazar, Hina

Committee Member(s)

• Pollock, Anthony
• Markley, Robert
• Weiss, Deborah

Department of Study

English

Discipline

English

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• singleness
• asexuality
• women writers
• eighteenth century

Abstract

“Celibate Pleasures” explores the importance of singleness to conceptualizations of female agency in British literature and culture in the early Enlightenment period. While critical narratives of women’s rejection of sex and/or marriage in literature of the period focus on the potential for closeted same-sex desire, I draw on the burgeoning field of early modern asexuality studies to take seriously women’s expressed desire for singleness, celibacy, chastity, and asexuality. As such, I bring to light an understudied phenomenon from the early moments of feminism, in which women, drawing on the legacy of medieval nuns, articulated singleness—and particularly vocational celibacy, an ideal which was lost in England after the Reformation—not as a restricted lifepath, but as one that opened up new pleasures, opportunities, and relational modes. In uncovering the single woman as a queer, subversive figure, I bring to light an underrecognized transhistorical strain of thought, uniting eighteenth-century women with their medieval predecessors and twenty-first-century legacy.

Graduation Semester

2023-08

Type of Resource

Thesis

Handle URL

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/121202

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2023 Megan Cole

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