Melissa E. Sanchez

Libertinism and Romance in Rochester's Poetry

The conceptual systems of romance and libertinism appear to offer opposing solutions to human frustration, and Rochesters poetry is typically read as endorsing one or the other perceptual mode. But such a neat division between idealized courtly love and unimpeded creaturely passion is untenable. I propose to demonstrate Rochesters awareness of the cohesion of romance sanguinity and libertine cynicism through a discussion of his use of the pastoral mode, which absorbs the ideals of both Greek romance and Epicurean libertinism. Unfortunately, these discourses of love and freedom encourage aggression and hypocrisy even as they promise to secure idyllic harmony, and the detached hedonism cultivated by Rochesters speakers thus conspicuously fails to transcend the disturbing maelstrom that is human desire. Far from escaping the salacious or sentimental aspects of experience, efforts to surmount erotic disappointment reveal that libertinism itself occupies the realm of romance: both offer the compensatory fictions without which human experience would be intolerable.

Fantasies of Friendship in The Faerie Queene, Book IV

For such members of the Sidney‐Essex circle as Spenser, who supported monarchy as such but were uneasy about a number of specific policies, what historians have described as a move in the 1590s away from mid‐century conciliar theories generated anxiety about the status of the nobility and the future of Protestantism. The erotic relations of the 1596 edition of The Faerie Queene register such concerns about the absolutist rhetoric of the last fifteen years of Elizabeths reign, most noticeably in the revised ending of Book III. Whereas the 1590 Book of Chastity concludes with Scudamour and Amoret merging into a hermaphroditic figure of mutual devotion, the 1596 version replaces this scene of conjugal bliss with a protracted narrative of Scudamours despairing suspicion and Amorets continued affliction. The nature of Amorets loyalty, moreover, is itself complicated by the concluding cantos of Book IV, which reveal that the husband for whom she has willingly suffered was in fact the first of her assailants. The disproportion between Amorets fidelity and Scudamours desert in the 1596 versions of Books III and IV suggests that idealized equations of love, virtue, and suffering may have lulled Amoret into complicity in her own abuse. This revision is thus crucial to Spensers project of fashioning a virtuous subject, for in apprehending the discrepancy between idealized narratives of mutual devotion and actual structures of unilateral sacrifice, the reader of The Faerie Queene may likewise come to recognize and resist the contradictions and inequities of late sixteenth‐century political practice.

This Field That Is Not One

A s Ari Friedlander shrewdly remarks in the introductory essay of this volume, “Just as there is no outsidetext, there is no outsidetime.” Yet (as Friedlander also notes) what it means to be “inside” time is far from settled or clear. Indeed, many recent debates about the relation between queer theory and historicist method might be said to emerge from precisely the uncertainty about the impact of time— with all of its associations: artificiality and flux, on the one hand, specificity and materiality, on the other— on scholarly work. Friedlander summarizes the arguments of several queer, psychoanalytic, and deconstructive critics who have pointed out that diachronic attention to change and difference over time can push us to stabilize the meaning of both past and present (if only strategically), thereby overlooking the multiple temporalities of any single moment. Equally, however, Friedlander observes, synchronic history can lead us to designate particular objects of study as though they exist beyond time (again, if only strategically) and therefore beyond the nittygritty particularities of political and material history. It can also lead us to neglect, as Will Stockton’s attention to the institutional dimension of intellectual work in this issue’s forum reminds us, our own situation in time and subjection to the embodied, material, political, and professional investments and ambitions of our current moment. This special issue of JEMCS is devoted to questions that have long occupied literary and cultural scholars of many stripes— formalist, historicist, deconstructive, psychoanalytic, postcolonial, queer, feminist, posthuman (the list could go on)— and whose formulations, along with responses, have varied intellectual values, methods, and sensibilities at the individual as well as the institutional levels. What is the relationship of a given text to its moments of

“She Straightness on the Woods Bestows”: Protestant Sexuality and English Empire in Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House”

In recent years, feminist historians and literary critics have demonstrated the importance of gendered hierarchies to English (and, after 1707, British) expansion into the Atlantic and Caribbean worlds. This work has responded to Joan W. Scott’s influential argument that gender must be a central category of historical analysis because “power relations among nations and the status of colonial subjects have been made comprehensible (and thus legitimate) in terms of relations between male and female.”1 In particular, feminist scholars of the Atlantic world have shown that the patriarchal authority of the male householder provided a model for English colonial power.2 Moreover, as Sarah M. S. Pearsall argues, colonies only became true “homes” for English settlers when Englishwomen arrived to make possible the replication of traditional structures of marriage and family.3 The household was not only a metaphor for colonization, that is, but also a material sign that English “civilization” had taken root in new lands. So even as Atlantic studies as a field has demonstrated the limitations of national histories, feminist contributions to Atlantic studies have demonstrated the limitations of histories that fail to discuss women and gender.4