Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 78-11(E), Section: A.

Advisers: John Rogers; Catherine Nicholson.

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Versions of Narcissus traces a nascent tradition of literary representations of the male form in the work of three canonical poets of the English Renaissance: Edmund Spenser (1552/3-1599), Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), and Andrew Marvell (1621- 1678). Versions is the first to conduct an analysis of the Narcissus myth in relation to and as a part of a broader classical provenance for the topos of male beauty over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This study examines what could be considered an opposing trend to scholarship that has addressed Narcissus almost entirely in relation to the literary representation of women and the gendering of the gaze to analysis. Versions therefore subjects to critical examination a selection of works by male poets in which the reception to the Narcissus myth entails two key phenomena: the outstanding representation of the male form and the consistent accompaniment of that representation with eruptions of a narrative self-consciousness, evinced by first-person asides that are exterior to the fiction itself.

While Versions charts the broader social and cultural implications of a comparatively neglected but nevertheless unmistakable facet of the Renaissance literary landscape, it also contributes to recent developments in the field of queer historicism. Given that the invention of the terms narcissism and homosexuality occurred roughly around the same time as their conflation (ca. the late nineteenth-century), Versions seeks to partially extricate Narcissus from that contemporary discourse and to historicize the myth. But at the same time that Versions aims to think of the myth of Narcissus before narcissism and to recover some of its meanings during a period that pre-exists that psychoanalytic category pathologizing homosexuality, what proves a motivation of my project also poses as its most daunting philological challenge. Versions explores the engagement of Renaissance poets with the myth of Narcissus in order to show how that myth serves as the most salient model through which to adjudicate the symptoms of what would become constituted as a pathology synonymous with narcissism: homosexuality.