Learning to be Advised

Yet again, I approached contacting my advisor with trepidation. Yet again, he had great wisdom and encouragement. My dissertation actually seems to be taking form, instead of looking like alphabet soup.

I had one of those insight moments last night where I realized that the work I've been doing fits in with the work I did for my areas, particularly my focus on female authority. Instead of looking at a broad range of female authorship and authority, I'm focusing on motherhood and queenship and how the two intertwine. The two preliminary topic proposals--one on QEI as "mother," the other on Anne Clifford's relationships with her mother and with her daughter--probably connect in some way and give me a good starting point. (This is Anne to the left.)

The big question I asked my advisor was how to approach non-literary texts from a literary perspective. He said that training as a literary scholar will naturally lead to literary questions (of genre, rhetoric, voice, (self-)representation, constructions of identity and authority, audience, etc.), but that my question now should really be how construct my work so that literary and non-literary texts interact. He cautioned against focusing solely on non-literary works (as he did; it makes the job market more difficult because one might be seen as too non-literary [this may be particularly true in Ren studies]), and encouraged me to focus on mother-queen images in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Sidney (again, making my areas work helpful), using non-literary texts to support and broaden my arguments.

In a week where I've felt more like quitting than like plugging along, this advisor response was a much needed and positive motivator. How did I manage to luck into the most awesome advisor (for me) ever?

On a sort of related note: I just found out that Anne Clifford had memorial for Edmund Spenser put up in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. Small world, that Renaissance aristocracy.
“HEARE LYES (EXPECTING THE SECOND COMMINGE OF OUR SAVIOVR CHRIST JESUS) THE BODY OF EDMOND SPENCER THE PRINCE OF POETS IN HIS TYME WHOSE DIVINE SPIRRIT NEEDS NOE OTHIR WITNESSE THEN THE WORKS WHICH HE LEFT BEHINDE HIM. HE WAS BORNE IN LONDON IN THE YEARE 1553 AND DIED IN THE YEARE 1598. Restored by private subscription 1778”.