The Queer Depiction of Diana in Early Modern Texts: Literary Transmission, Classical Inheritance, and the Queer Network Aesthetic

In examining texts from the late-sixteenth-century panegyrics on Elizabeth I, to the women's pastoral poetry produced within the Jacobite court, this thesis questions how far early modern writers conceptualise the Roman goddess of chastity, Diana, as the leader of a separatist, gynocentric community,

presiding over a space that licenses homoeroticism. My reading of a broad range of texts uncovers a textual network of writing on Diana, that engage with and respond to one another, and to early modern sexual theories - a complex web of intertextuality that rejects a straightforward teleology of literary inheritance. The concept of a 'queer network' is the subject of my final

chapter, as I argue that Anne Killigrew, Anne Finch and Jane Barker create a network aesthetic in their pastoral poetry: the poets map the nexus of their relationships onto the mythological world of Diana's forest, as an alternative, queer mode of relationality to that enforced by the patriarchal economy.

Contributing to queer historical studies and to queer theory more generally, I argue for the existence of the network as an aesthetic for representing queer connection long before the explicitly queer narratives of contemporary media, inviting new readings of texts that critics have seldom read as queer.