Jemma Louise Forster

Thesis Title: ‘The Queer Depiction of Diana: Early Modern Texts: Literary Transmission, Classical Inheritance, and the Queer Network Aesthetic’.

Supervisor: Dr. Tania Demetriou

In examining texts from the late-sixteenth-century panegyrics on Elizabeth I, to the women’s pastoral poetry of the Jacobite court, my 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 developing theories of sexuality – a complex web of intertextuality that rejects a straightforward teleology of literary inheritance. 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.

I completed my English BA at The University of Cambridge in 2022, and my MA in Early Modern English Literature at King’s College London in 2023. My OOC AHRC DTP studentship is co-funded by Trinity Hall.