| The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the treatment of Petrarchism in genres other than the sonnet sequence. In its simplest definition, the Petrarchan tradition consists of works employing the poetic form, figurative language, and subject matter popularized in the love poetry of Francesco Petrarca. Describing the unconsummated love of the poet for his mistress, Petrarchan lyrics are most often monovocal, representing exclusively the point of view of the male poet-lover. Petrarchism is thus a discourse of control; although the poet-lover complains of his debasement before the lady, he controls her in discourse. This sometimes obsessive control masks a deeper anxiety about the distinction between lover and beloved, pointing to an instability in the assumed boundary between speaker and spoken, and ultimately, male and female.; While the gender politics described above have become almost a commonplace, few critics have attempted a systematic examination of Petrarchism as a general literary motif. I would contend that the Petrarchan relationship of lover and beloved constitutes a conceptual unit which carries with it its larger discursive implications regardless of its formal location, implications which serve as the means to reformulate the meaning of Petrarchism, the 'host genre,' or both. For example, the monovocal format of the Petrarchan lyric contrasts to the polyvocality of some typical 'host genres' (e.g. drama), so that the larger form serves to objectify the dyadic relation of lover and beloved. Instead of constituting the entire discourse, the poet-lover's complaint appears as only one of perhaps several competing narratives. Taking this sort of generic and discursive interaction as its focus, this project examines the formal implications of the importation of Petrarchism into three non-lyric genres: the epyllion, the prose romance, the drama. Each chapter focuses on one of these genres and explores the generic interaction which conditions the use of Petrarchism within the larger 'host' text. The conclusions drawn about each instance of generic interaction shed light on the relation of desire and subjectivity to language and literary form, a range of issues which particularly engage the correlation of gender and sexuality to discursivity. |
