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Gender Formation and Queer Love in Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 20”
The young man, the subject of Shakespeare’s first 126 sonnets, is an ambiguous presence. Despite being written about extensively, he is never described in full. His gender, interestingly, is neither easily identifiable nor stable. In sonnet 20, the young man’s gender is confusingly put into focus and blurred. Either as a means of correcting Nature’s queer feelings or as a mistake, the young man ends up with a penis. By hypercorrecting—I adopt this linguistics term to mean mistakenly correcting something to avoid the nonstandard—her queer love, Nature ultimately perpetuates it and reveals the insignificance of gender as it relates to love. The young man is immediately a gender-bending force.…
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Deadly Diction: Examining Emerging Medical Anxieties in “The Body-Snatcher”
Part of the appeal of studying literature in university is bearing witness to the human experience through the centuries. Victorian gothic literature explores a variety of emerging anxieties, and the emergence of medicine as both a profession and an authority throughout the nineteenth century became intertwined with gothic literature. Laurence Talairach-Vielmas argues that nineteenth-century gothic literature was both a vessel for spreading knowledge about emerging medicine, and a means through which the public could engage with it in “‘I Have Bottled Babes Unborn’: The Gothic, Medical Collections and Victorian Popular Culture.” Talairach-Vielmas explores the propagation of knowledge and documentation of public reactions in gothic literature by way of a wide…