English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item IMAGINING REDEMPTION: FICTIONAL FORMS AND SENSORY EXPERIENCE IN EARLY MODERN POETICS FROM SIDNEY TO MILTON(2020) Neff, Adam Bryan; Passannante, Gerard; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project examines how four early modern authors—Sir Philip Sidney (d. 1586), William Shakespeare (d. 1616), Sir Francis Bacon (d. 1626), and John Milton (d. 1674)—viewed imaginative writing. I argue that all four writers see fictions as a potential instrument of cosmic redemption with the potential to mitigate the effects of the fall. Starting with Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, this dissertation traces a belief that fictions affect our often-unacknowledged assumptions about what is possible or likely in the world and the judgments we make about whether a fiction is believable or not. According to Sidney’s imaginative poetics, well-crafted fictions that appear to be a mimesis of the material world but contain elements of the poet’s “golden” world shift readers’ presuppositions, which in turn change how they interact with the material world and make the (formerly fictional) vision of the poet into material reality. For these writers, fictions’ impacts are profound but difficult to perceive because they change us and, through our actions, the world, essentially becoming fact because we have made them so. In four chapters this project presents a theory of Sidney’s poetics and the unusual scope it granted to poets’ and readers’ imaginations, as well as the moral and cultural anxieties that his poetic theories provoked in his own writings and those of his literary successors. Chapter two reads Shakespeare’s King Lear as a study of imaginative excess and its civilizational consequences, calling into question whether or not restorative fictions can indeed keep delusive, self-destructive ones at bay. Shakespeare presents a nightmare vision of civilizational collapse in which fictions retain their persuasive power but lose their architectonic impulse. In response to this threat, Bacon’s poetics becomes an experiment in how rigorously we can restrain the imagination from knowledge creation while still keeping an unseen, providential, redemptive teleology in mind. Recognizing the dangers of too much or too little restraint on the imagination, Milton explores a formal solution in Paradise Regained. The poem’s fictional mediation of Jesus’ temptation and use of metaphors steers readers between excessive and deficient imaginative responses to the Son of God.Item "Melancholy's Wake: Loss and Literary Imagination in Eighteenth-Century Britain"(2016) Williams, Jonathan C.; Chico, Tita; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)If the centuries preceding and following it are known for their revolutionary character (the seventeenth century for its regicide and the Romantic period for the French Revolution), then the eighteenth century in Britain has seemed in many accounts to be an age of progress rather than upheaval. As a period of refined sensibility and rapid economic growth, the British eighteenth century appears to be marked by an insistence on social stability and thus to have little room for melancholy, the sadness that does not end. In “Melancholy’s Wake,” however, I contend that the politically revolutionary spirit that seems otherwise missing in the eighteenth century is located instead in the melancholic language of loss deployed by the graveyard poems and the sentimental novels, among other genres. Across a range of genres, loss works as a synecdoche for cultural crises figured by the rise of commercialism and sociability. While modernity offers the promise of a prosperous future for the upwardly mobile, some literary writers see modernity instead as the erasure of opportunity for the lower-rank. In dwelling with the spirit of loss, literary writers see a trace of the revolutionary spirit in the quiet expression of melancholy, as such expressions cannot be assimilated within the project of modernity. Such quiet expressions also reveal, however, that some aspects of revolutionary thought are fundamentally inoperative. Melancholy sees utopic thought as a dream not accessible to the present, but the articulation of such a dream offers an alternative to modernity when no other alternative presents itself.