Slaston S. "The gender discourse of the British poetry of the late XVI – first half of the XVIII century"

The dissertation is a gender discourse multifaceted study of British (English and Scottish) poetry of the late XVI – first half of the XVIII century. It is found that gender motifs of the texts are not always essentially transformed according to the chronological boundaries of cultural epochs. They either correspond to the real standards of their time or precede social stereotypes; other time gender motifs reflect some antiquated notions of British society. This led us to define the boundaries of our study by two macro-scale historical eras: the Reformation and the Restoration. In theoretical terms, for the first time the poetic interpretation of the concept of «gender motif» was introduced and approved on the material of English and Scottish poetry of the Reformation and Restoration periods. The methodological basis of the research rests on the analysis of hypertext, inter / cross-textual and megatextual elements of poetry with considering the gender issue. The analyzed texts are examined in three aspects: generational, matrimonial and societal. It has been proven that, the gender motif is an element of the text that first responds to changes in historical, cultural and social contexts. Thus, the gender motif absorbing and adopting these features keeps them as established rules (norms) and taboos (restrictions) for a long time. Thereby gender motifs in poetry reflect the signs of historical and cultural features of a particular era, the specifics of national, ethnic, social, generational and religious identity, which allow this phenomenon to be defined as one of the extensive terms in the field of literary methodology. In our study, we additionally highlighted the generational aspect. In the paper was proved that generation is one of the aspects in poetry that significantly affects the other aspects mentioned above (societal and matrimonial) and indicates the close relations between gender and religious motifs in poetry, which significantly expands the functional paradigm of gender from social to the sacred. The ideology of the English and Scots change significantly during this period. Renaissance anthropocentrism is replaced by property-centrism in matrimonial, generational and societal aspects in the Baroque era. Therefore, a common generational feature in the texts of poets is the peripheral motif of childhood and oldness (old age); the marginal motif of maturity, but the dominant motif of youth. Oldness as one of the signs of gender in the poetry of male authors is an element of such narrative: aging is always a portrait, chronotope and plot of the Other (other wife, other husband etc.). Awareness of one’s own old age from the position of a masculine author: 1) appears later than from a feminine position; 2) is a sign of peripheral sense, that on the whole appears chronologically late for the analyzed period (only at the beginning of the XVIII century), and is always accompanied by an existential motif of fatigue and sadness. From a feminine point of view, this motif correlates with a bright memory of youth.