representation, self-representation, personal pronouns, subject position, paradigmatic, subjectivity
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paradigmatic shift in which there emerges a transition in women’s literary presence from representation to self-representation. That Seymour picks up specifically on the use of doubled personal pronouns as a construction predisposed to male monopoly of the subject position, and the violence with which this territory is contested, suggests the suitability of reading this exchange as representing a point at which the tension between the roles of the definer and the defined, the subject and object, reached critical mass. Rodney’s overburdened double personal pronouns, as Eric Langley has suggested in his recent Ph.D thesis, suggest both an assertion of self and a negation of self.
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His subjectivity constantly teeters on the edge of disintegration, and it only took a small push for Seymour to make way for her own subjectivity. Perhaps these poems should even be read as representing the very epicentre of a paradigmatic shift towards female self-representation.
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Two Misogynist Satirists and their Female Respondents: Lady Mary Cheke and Lady Mary Wroth
The literary objectification of women in the Renaissance was twofold. The limitations placed
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Eric Langley, ‘Self-Love and Self-Slaughter in the Works of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Leeds University, 2003), p.8.
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