2026-09-22T06:48:45Z https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/121202 2023-12-11 col_2142_5131 col_2142_8906 com_2142_5130 com_2142_8904 com_2142_8903

Nazar, Hina Nazar, Hina Pollock, Anthony Markley, Robert Weiss, Deborah 2023-08 application/pdf en text Submission published under a 24 month embargo labeled 'Closed Access', the embargo will last until 2025-08-01 The student, Megan Cole, accepted the attached license on 2023-06-14 at 08:22. The student, Megan Cole, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2023-06-14 at 08:59. This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2023-06-22 at 10:14. DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #19422 on 2023-12-04 at 17:30:26 Celibate pleasures: convents, asexuality, and women's agency in British literature, 1660-1760 Cole, Megan Elizabeth 2023-06-22 Singleness Asexuality Women Writers Eighteenth Century “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. Text eng https://hdl.handle.net/2142/121202 Copyright 2023 Megan Cole Ph.D. Dissertation English University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign English