“The meetings of agreeing souls”: Katherine Philips and the sexual/textual politics of the coterie
Abstract
This dissertation argues for a reading of Philips that necessarily understands her as a political writer in a social context. Politics offers a touchstone for investigating the workings of coterie manuscript circulation within Philips's circle of readers and responders and political themes offer inroads into the social modes, political stances, and cultural manners that inflect the readings of Philips's writing. Because of this focus on the social action of literature within the Philips circle, this dissertation is not a work of purely literary criticism and it draws upon a range of disciplines, including biography, social history, book history and manuscript studies. Critiquing Philips from multiple points of engagement illuminates the coterie's role as both a trope within Philips's writing and as a mediator and instigator of it. Because of this, the first two chapters of the dissertation focus upon biographical and historical issues while the final two focus upon particular examples of coterie expression as it appears in some of Philips's poetry, letters and plays.
Subject Area
Literature|British and Irish literature|Theater|Biographies
Recommended Citation
Tinker, Nathan Paul, "“The meetings of agreeing souls”: Katherine Philips and the sexual/textual politics of the coterie" (2002). ETD Collection for Fordham University. AAI3045138.
https://research.library.fordham.edu/dissertations/AAI3045138
