• The Life Aquatic: Liquid Poetics and the Discourse of Friendship inThe Faerie Queene

    Author(s):
    Steven Swarbrick (see profile)
    Date:
    2018
    Group(s):
    CLCS Renaissance and Early Modern, Environmental Humanities, Literary theory, TC Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities, TM Literary and Cultural Theory
    Subject(s):
    Oceania, Area studies, Ecocriticism, Affect (Psychology)
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    Edmund Spenser, Blue humanities, Gender and sexualities, Oceanic studies, Theories of affect
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/rske-nw39
    Abstract:
    From Michel de Montaigne’s essay “Of Friendship” to Jacques Derrida’s rearticulation of the former in The Politics of Friendship, scholars both early modern and modern have sought ways to address the fluid co-mixture of bodies from which the discourse of friendship can and does emerge. More recently still, new materialist thinkers of ontology have begun to shift our attention to the ways both human and nonhuman bodies inter-animate in the making of political, interpersonal, and artistic life worlds. Together with these investigations, I argue that an aquacentric account of relation is necessary to think the subject of friendship in Spenser’s epic. Beginning with Spenser’s queer address to Ralegh in Book III of The Faerie Queene and continuing through Book IV, I argue that Spenser reimagines the discourse of friendship in terms of a liquid, transcorporeal poetics, one that not only takes to its logical extreme humoral descriptions of bodies as conduits for liquids and passions but also importantly reworks human-exceptionalist readings of ontology in Spenser’s epic.
    Metadata:
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    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    doi.org/10.7756/spst.030.014.229-53
    Publisher:
    University of Chicago Press
    Pub. Date:
    2018-7-24
    Journal:
    Spenser Studies
    Volume:
    30
    Page Range:
    229 - 253
    ISSN:
    0195-9468,2167-8529
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    3 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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