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Abstract
In this thesis, I explore temporality and spatial rhetoric in Publius Vergilius Maro's Aeneid, Dante Alighieri's Divina Commedia, and Christopher Marlowe's Dido Queen of Carthage by focusing on medieval and early modern appropriation of Virgil's Dido and Aeneas story. The Dido-Aeneas story these authors adapt comes from the Aeneid, which Virgil originally created as a nationalist epic glorifying Augustan Rome. His epic contains anachronic (non-linear) and antichronic (against historical time) temporalities, as well as Augustan teleology (temporality that privileges the future). Later authors also use this story and these temporalities to suggest similar communities, but communities divorced from any nationalist agenda. Dante Alighieri proposes a Christian, instead of pagan, community through his manipulation of Virgil's teleology, and Christopher Marlowe proposes a queer, instead of hetero- and gender-normative, community by his use of antichrony and anachrony.