UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item "I Shall Tell A Double Tale": Empedoclean Materialism and Idealism in the English Renaissance(2022) Libhart, Garth; Passannante, Gerard; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles (ca. 484–ca. 424 BCE) is remembered both as an enraged fool who leapt into a volcano to prove he was a god, and as a philosopher who radically suggested everything is made of matter (DK107). In the fragments of his poetry, he admits to telling a “double tale,” potentially nodding to the indistinct ontological vision embedded in his work and underscoring the way his poetry shifts between materialist and idealist frames of reference (DK17.1). I argue that Empedocles’ perspectival relativism is an alternative entry point into the problem of materialism for early modern thinkers, freeing them from the burden of strict philosophical commitment and enabling them to think in materialist terms with less anxiety about succumbing to physical determinism. For scholars of early modern literature, the Empedoclean double tale helps root the period’s tendency for perspectival indeterminacy within a specific humanistic tradition. This dissertation is organized as three long chapters, each offering a unique moment in the reception of Empedocles’ blurry ontology. In Chapter One, I argue that Philemon Holland’s 1603 translation of Plutarch’s Moralia represents a watershed moment for Empedoclean influence in English literary history. My analysis demonstrates that, while the discredited story of Empedocles jumping into a volcano to prove he was a god continues to be an attention-grabbing part of the philosopher’s legacy in the Renaissance, the seventeenth century witnesses an increasing interest in his actual philosophy. Specifically, early modern writers draw inspiration from Empedocles’ theory of effluence—the idea that the four elements emanate tiny particles of a similar composition—as they contemplate monist possibility (DK89). Illustrating this, in Chapter Two, I read Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1607) as an exploration of the world in flux, showing how one of Shakespeare’s likely sources for the play, Plutarch’s treatise on Isis and Osiris in the Moralia, uses the idea of effluence to negotiate between the myth’s dualistic and monistic aspects. This enables me to propose that, in Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare undergirds moments like Cleopatra’s elementally framed suicide with the dynamic “double tale” of Empedoclean ontology, portraying her immortal aspiration in simultaneously materialist and transcendent terms. Finally, in Chapter Three, I turn to John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), which directly alludes to Empedocles’ volcanic suicide when Satan encounters the ghost of Empedocles, floating in Limbo, during his journey from hell to earth. Showing how Milton draws on key ideas from Empedocles’ philosophy in the process of critiquing his immortal longing, I argue that the episode is underwritten by the philosopher’s perspectival relativism. The chapter then reconsiders the monist materialism of Paradise Lost through an Empedoclean lens, suggesting that the Pre-Socratic philosopher’s unusual blend of dualistic and monistic ideation can help negotiate between divergent critical responses to Milton’s idiosyncratic materialism. Ultimately, the dissertation reveals how early modern writers take inspiration from Empedocles’ fluid movement between materialism and idealism, freed from the limitations of rigid philosophical commitment and binary choice.Item The Ethics of Allegory in /Paradise Lost/(2011) Vasileiou, Margaret Rice; Grossman, Marshall; Leinwand, Theodore; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation reframes the debate about whether Paradise Lost is an allegorical poem by focusing on Milton's assertion that all language is allegorical because it reflects the difference-from-Himself that God has inscribed into language and built into human ontology. Milton emphasizes this allegorical difference in two ways in Paradise Lost. First, he points out the difference between the logic of language and the landscape by which we try to describe and apprehend it, even ascribing the fall to Eve's decision to ignore this difference and to embrace the logic of language as if it captured truth. Second, he forces the allegorical figures of Sin and Death to contend with and participate in Christian history, thereby destabilizing their figurations as representations of abstract ideas, and displaying the impossibility of fusing word and thing (i.e., of collapsing allegorical difference) in the historical context of pre-apocalyptic time. This dissertation argues that Milton uses both of these strategies to oppose the universal language ideology of the late seventeenth century, whose proponents promised to speak the world exactly as it is, to fuse word and thing. From Milton's perspective, these proponents threatened to write over God's truth with a language that reflected their desire for intellectual domination of the world more than it reflected the natural world they supposedly sought to describe. Thus, Paradise Lost reminds us that word and thing cannot be fused, that other-speaking not only reflects human ontology--that is, humankind's suspension in a state of difference from and similarity to God--but also represents the only kind of speaking that refers to God. Language that does not admit its difference from truth, in contrast, writes over the sublime truth with a verbal idol that purports to embody what it can only allegorically represent.Item The Golden Chain: Royal Slavery, Sovereignty and Servitude in Early Modern English Literature, 1550-1688(2006-12-06) Bossert, Andrew Raymond; Leinwand, Theodore B.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Enchained kings, enthroned slaves, and enthralled subjects--these are the emblems of royal slavery abounding in early modern English literature. They express concerns over national identity and monarch-subject relationships, and they arise in debates regarding absolutism, constitutionalism, and imperialism between the years 1550 and 1688. Thus, my dissertation performs close readings of rhetorical tropes relating to two early modern debates: monarchy's function and servitude's nature. This research synthesizes work by David Norbrook, Rebecca Bushnell, and Constance Jordan regarding the influence of domestic politics on English literature with studies by Kim Hall, Ania Loomba, and Nabil Matar on English imperialism. The introduction explores early modern depictions of Moses, whose self-denial advances nation-building. Three types of royal slavery emerge: 1) a slave who becomes a prince, 2) a slave who becomes a prince's property, or 3) a prince who becomes a slave. Moses experiences all three types, and serves as a model for other royal slaves and English leaders. Chapter One examines enslavement to monarchs. Political rebels and love slaves in [i]Julius Caesar[/i], [i]Antony and Cleopatra[/i], accounts of Hercules, and the [i]Fairie Queene[/i] describe slavery to excuse disloyalty. However, these examples also blame subjects for enslaving themselves. Chapter Two shows how images of enslaved kings appeal to pathos. Sympathetic royal slaves appear in Guevara's [i]Diall of Princes[/i], Owen Feltham's [i]Resolves[/i], and Marlowe's [i]Tamburlaine[/i]. Shakespeare's plays problematize sympathetic royal slave rhetoric, while [i]The Rape of Lucrece[/i]'s royal slave images question the poem's republicanism. Hutchinson's [i]Order and Disorder[/i] uses royal slave figures as anti-monarchical invectives. Chapter Three discusses slaves who become rulers who learn that true restoration is impossible. In Milton's [i]Paradise Lost[/i], the devils' utopia masks their vulnerability; Scudery's Briseis in [i]Several witty discourses[/i] depicts an enslaved princess's false restoration. However, Scudery's Cariclia and Cartwright's protagonist in [i]The Royal Slave[/i] suggest that patience yields rewards surpassing one's original state. My conclusion argues that the slave revolt in Aphra Behn's [i]Oroonoko[/i] fails because, like the English themselves, the slaves have a fractured national identity. Without commonwealth, the slaves surrender to private interests. Thus, Behn comments directly on colonial practice and metaphorically on English politics.