Sexuality, agency and intertextuality in the later poetry of John Clare

Kövesi, S, 1999. Sexuality, agency and intertextuality in the later poetry of John Clare. PhD, Nottingham Trent University.

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Abstract

This thesis close-reads the later poetry of John Clare to explore issues of sexuality, intertextuality and artistic agency. Emergent from this exploration are consistent themes which centre upon the male speaker's interaction with and representation of the feminine. It considers poems in a formalistic manner, tracing rhyme, metre and structure from which emerge detailed considerations of Clare's reaction to and engagement with some of his contemporaries. The intertextual aspect of Clare's work is explored with the same formalist foregrounding of sound and image. A consistent belief, established in the Introduction, is that regardless of the site of writing, Clare maintains his artistic agency. Indeed, in the final chapter, I discuss Don Juan A Poem which explicitly discusses Clare's role as a masculine artist. This poem is discussed as a conclusion to the thesis because, although in many ways atypical of Clare, it is in this poem that the major themes of the thesis clearly surface and explicitly interact. The conclusion is really an endnote, but it draws the threads of representations of the feminine in Clare's later poetry together, and finally establishes the consistency and potency of his artistic agency.

Item Type:	Thesis
Creators:	Kövesi, S.
Date:	1999
ISBN:	9781369325393
Identifiers:	Number Type PQ10290290 Other
Divisions:	Schools > School of Arts and Humanities
Record created by:	Linda Sullivan
Date Added:	28 Jun 2021 11:40
Last Modified:	13 Dec 2023 14:53
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/43263

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