Manley's Queer Forms: Repetition, techno-performativity, and the body
Manley's Queer Forms: Repetition, techno-performativity, and the body
This chapter interrogates Manley’s repeated explorations of seduction and its effects, focusing on the characters of Urania (The New Atalantis), the eponymous Rivella, and Mariana (‘The Physician’s Strategem’ in The Power of Love). It examines the ways in which texts and bodies in Manley’s writing can disrupt and rework the seduction narrative by comparing Urania’s death in childbirth, Rivella’s self-consciously literary self-portrait, and Mariana’s rape, pregnancy, and retirement to a convent. Read together, these variations of the seduction narrative demonstrate the way in which Manley uses formula to examine the interactions between the discursively-constituted and material forms of being. The chapter argues that her use of formula can thus be read as proto-queer: Manley uses queering as a practice to work through redeployments and reformulations of power. Manley’s repetitions establish a citational world of repressive necessity and constructed identities, but Manley experiments with gender and sexuality within this framework, testing out the possibility of productive disruptions, whilst simultaneously exploring the transformative potential of the pregnant body.
106-121
Simpson, Kim
1cc9c348-4f76-403a-97e3-63896b89d8c5
2017
Simpson, Kim
1cc9c348-4f76-403a-97e3-63896b89d8c5
Simpson, Kim
(2017)
Manley's Queer Forms: Repetition, techno-performativity, and the body.
In,
Hultquist, Aleksondra and Mathews, Elizabeth J.
(eds.)
New Perspectives on Delarivier Manley and Eighteenth Century Literature: Power, Sex, and Text.
(Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature)
Abingdon, Oxon and New York.
Routledge, .
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Abstract
This chapter interrogates Manley’s repeated explorations of seduction and its effects, focusing on the characters of Urania (The New Atalantis), the eponymous Rivella, and Mariana (‘The Physician’s Strategem’ in The Power of Love). It examines the ways in which texts and bodies in Manley’s writing can disrupt and rework the seduction narrative by comparing Urania’s death in childbirth, Rivella’s self-consciously literary self-portrait, and Mariana’s rape, pregnancy, and retirement to a convent. Read together, these variations of the seduction narrative demonstrate the way in which Manley uses formula to examine the interactions between the discursively-constituted and material forms of being. The chapter argues that her use of formula can thus be read as proto-queer: Manley uses queering as a practice to work through redeployments and reformulations of power. Manley’s repetitions establish a citational world of repressive necessity and constructed identities, but Manley experiments with gender and sexuality within this framework, testing out the possibility of productive disruptions, whilst simultaneously exploring the transformative potential of the pregnant body.
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K. Simpson. Manley's Queer Forms.
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e-pub ahead of print date: 1 July 2016
Published date: 2017
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English
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Local EPrints ID: 408520
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/408520
PURE UUID: 5e3eee57-0ad1-40e5-95ae-737470248019
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Date deposited: 23 May 2017 04:01
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 13:34
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Contributors
Editor:
Aleksondra Hultquist
Editor:
Elizabeth J. Mathews
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