Early Modern Collectors and Hoarders: Idolatry, Matter, and Inheritance in English Poetry and Drama, from Spenser to Milton

Yates, Christopher

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Overview

Year:: 2021
Contributor:: Yates, Christopher (creator); Kuzner, James (Reader); Rambuss, Richard (Reader); Newman, Karen (Advisor); Brown University. Department of English (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: English literature--Early modern
Extent:: 6, 231 p.

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Abstract:: This dissertation focuses on the figures of the hoarder and collector in their various manifestations in early modern poetry and drama – from popular icons of greed or miserliness to less obvious hoarder-types, including sodomites, monks, nuns, cave-dwelling monsters, librarians, encyclopedia compilers, "blocking" characters, chroniclers, bibliophiles, Baroque artists, numismatists, idol-worshippers, and antiquarians. The following chapters attend to hoarding and collecting in order to examine some closely interrelated questions of economic production, sexual procreation, and the generation of linguistic meaning in several prominent works of the English Renaissance. Throughout, I draw from both early modern and contemporary theories regarding correct use, greed, and the responsibilities of inheritance. The first two chapters largely concern the physical hoarding of things (including currency, books, and bodies) as a social and economic problem; the latter two instead think through “the collection” as a distinctly Baroque mode of representation, untangling some of the consequences and possibilities that arise from the collector’s treatment of history as a more or less interchangeable series of actions or events (i.e., a chronicle,) rather than a causally ordered narrative. All chapters, but particularly the last two, are deeply indebted to Walter Benjamin’s luminous writings on collecting, which, I argue, critically interrogate the distinctions upon which the necessarily discriminating logic of idolatry stands.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2021

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Citation

Yates, Christopher, "Early Modern Collectors and Hoarders: Idolatry, Matter, and Inheritance in English Poetry and Drama, from Spenser to Milton" (2021). English Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:8b55ywev/

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English Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the English department.
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