Description
- Abstract:
- “Questionable Histories and the Aesthetic of Historiography from Shakespeare to Milton,” examines the aesthetic and political consequences of standardizing history writing during the period of early modern colonial expansion. By thinking of historiography as an aesthetic category and not only a disciplinary or methodological one, this project reads early modernity’s nascent scientism as the foundation for a set of negotiations concerning the proper contents of literary and historical forms. “Questionable Histories” overlays historiographical uncertainty onto the early modern genre system to evince the challenges of writing histories in an era newly constrained by demands for material evidence, eye-witness testimony, and hard fact. Each chapter explores aesthetic and historiographical impasses in premodern epochal narratives—the Trojan founding of Britain and its constitutive indigenous genocide, Britain’s negotiations with imperial Rome at the BC/AD divide, England’s racialized colonization of Ireland—attesting to the centrality of claims to history in colonial projects and modern literary criticism. Recognizing disciplinary investments in these early modern representations of colonization spotlights the enmeshed standardizations of early modern genres, criticism, and the writing of history. I argue that the swift and inconsistent modernization of the practices of writing the past occludes the flexibility of early modern histories and the indebtedness of our concept of literature to colonialist historiographical procedures.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2023
Citation
Madani, Ali,
"Questionable Histories and the Aesthetics of Historiography from Shakespeare to Milton"
(2023).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:879v862f/
