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“I Can neither Write nor Be Silent:” The Circulation of Women's Texts in Sidney's Old Arcadia *
Author(s) -
Ghita Lucian
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00308.x
Subject(s) - arcadia , semiotics , the renaissance , circulation (fluid dynamics) , literature , relation (database) , narrative , negotiation , history , sociology , art , art history , philosophy , linguistics , social science , physics , database , computer science , thermodynamics
This essay won the 2005 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Renaissance Section. The production, circulation, and reception of women's texts in early modern Europe probe important questions about the status of women as writers of public influence within a male‐dominated manuscript and print culture. Insofar as it foregrounds the semiotic exchanges between author, text, and reader in Phillips Sydney's Old Arcadia , Derrida's concept of supplementarity opens up new ways of interpreting the political and gender economy of Sidney's language in relation to the socio‐cultural positions of women in early modern England. The Old Arcadia presents several scenes in which women, specifically Pamela, use writing as a self‐reflective mode of negotiating a position of authority within an unstable semiotic space.