Manipulation of the patriarchal order by means of a letter − this is one of the main topics I am going to investigate while I continue my research in order to extend an eight-page essay I have produced during the previous semester. This essay, which is dealing with William Wycherley’s Restoration comedy The Country Wife, provides a brief analysis of the subversive role of women in a patriarchal society where wit is a dangerous weapon – especially in the hands of females.

Now that I am planning to compose my upcoming MA thesis on the basis of the above-mentioned essay, I intend to follow two major directions in my research. On the one hand, the unique relation between writing and deception offers itself to a wide range of possible discourses within the field of sexuality and, most of all, sexual identity as such. Although the topic of writing as deception has already been explored to some extent, my new findings show that this a more exciting direction than I first thought.

On the other hand, in order to provide a proper introduction to my reader, I would like to analyse the critical background of the authors cited in my essay. In other words, I will look into how the works cited correspond with other works by the same authors, and how influential these authors were in the last few decades − if they were influential at all. (For instance, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a well-known “guru” in the field of gender studies, published several influential works on queer theory, too, including Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire.)

In the following blog posts, I invite the gentle reader to join me in this exciting investigation of mine and to gain introspection into the various struggles of an academic research (which is, I assume, probably not unfamiliar to the reader). The journey will include the exploration and explanation of different secondary sources, and will hopefully result in the fruitful development of the already-mentioned essay on William Wycherley’s The Country Wife.