The Shapes of Fancy

Christine Marie Varnado

This dissertation rethinks the category of queer desire in early modern drama and early colonial travel narratives. Moving beyond previous scholarship which has conceived of early modern sexuality chiefly in terms of same-sex erotic acts, proto-homosexual identities, or homosocial relations, this dissertation describes new forms of heightened erotic feeling which are qualitatively queer in how they depart from conventional or expected trajectories, and not because of the genders of lover and love object. Each chapter considers an iconic scene in early modern literature, and draws out a specific, recurring affective mode - paranoid suspicion, willing instrumentality, inexhaustible fancy, and colonial melancholia -- which I argue constitutes a queer form of desiring. Chapter 1 argues that both a witch trial pamphlet, Newes from Scotland (1591), and a witch trial play, The Witch of...