Peculiar Miracles: Pastoral Time and Queer Desire in English Literature, 1570-1670 160 views

“Peculiar Miracles: Pastoral Time and Queer Desire in English Literature, 1570-1670” details the queer workings of time in the anachronic green worlds of early modern pastoral romance. I identify three distinct queer forms of what I call Arcadian time, each of which can be found throughout early modern pastoral romance: broken time, missing time, and suspended time. Each of these forms of time, I argue, generates and enables unexpected forms of desire, too. Previous scholarship at the intersection of pastoral literature and queer theory has tended to focus on erotic encounters between male shepherds. Accordingly, many critics have found early modern pastoral, which often lacks the explicit male-male homoeroticism of classical tradition, to be in some way fundamentally heteronormative. By defining Arcadia as not just landscape but timescape, however, I locate expansive new queer possibilities within early modern pastoral romance. The first chapter of the dissertation analyzes broken time in two versions of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, Philip Sidney’s prose romance: the Old Arcadia, which has a complete ending, and the New Arcadia, which does not. I argue that the New Arcadia’s broken ending stems from Sidney’s increased attention to the queer, warped temporalities of pastoral romance. The second chapter turns to Shakespeare’s experimentations with Arcadian time in The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline, two plays indebted to pastoral romance tradition. Both plays feature what Shakespeare calls a “gap in time.” This chapter charts the queer and trans possibilities found within the gap in time and embodied by characters like Innogen, Time, Autolycus, and Paulina. The third chapter of the dissertation examines the ‘parting poems’ of Katherine Philips, a poem whose relationship with pastoral romance has not previously been explored at length. I argue that Philips intentionally invokes the queer temporalities of pastoral romance in her homoerotic friendship poems, in which she breaks time by constructing alternative worlds in which she might live (or die) alongside a friend. Lastly, the dissertation’s coda uses modern adaptations of these early modern texts to consider the affective pleasures—and urgent stakes—of reading history queerly.

PHD (Doctor of Philosophy)

pastoral romance; queer temporality; Renaissance literature; William Shakespeare; Philip Sidney; Katherine Philips

English

All rights reserved (no additional license for public reuse)

2025-07-09