Ella Alton

My thesis is provisionally titled 'Imagining the Cloister in English Drama, Estate Poetry, and Cheap Print, 1611-1800.' This thesis traces the use of the nun as a counter-cultural symbol in English literature from 1600 - 1800. In the context of Protestant England, the materially absent nun becomes an imaginatively mobile figure. As well as religious difference, she is used to negotiate queerness, proto-feminism, and proto-anticapitalism; the symbol of the nun and the space of the convent articulate meaning in the absence of alternative cultural iconography. The project is organised by form. I examine estate poetry, cheap print, drama, and novels, remaining attentive to the ways in which form shapes the nuns' meanings and manifestations across a wide generic sweep. I read the nun’s transfigurations in tandem with contemporary Catholic threats, English nationalism, and the rise of the ‘singlewoman’; I trace a consistent interconnection between representations of nuns and spinsters or 'old-maids' in the latter half of the period. As well as contributing to studies of the long-Reformation, this study makes a much-needed critical contribution at the intersection of queer, feminist and Catholic studies.