Description
- Abstract:
- This dissertation explores the poetics of the nation that emerge in England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It demonstrates how some of the period's thinkers—namely Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter Ralegh, and John Milton—resisted the image of an isolated England, imagining a new world system in which a more cosmopolitan England was an integral part. This necessarily involves yoking together the seemingly contradictory impulses of national identity and cosmopolitanism, concepts that were still fluid and mutable during this period. The dissertation's primary argument is founded on the idea that boundaries—those that delimit genre or geography— should function not as stops, but as sites of negotiation and exchange. Due to its generic multiplicity, adaptability, and thematic concern with border crossings and cross-cultural contact, the romance mode is the ideal vehicle for such an examination. Organized around an ethical value system that presumes a universal worldview about individual morality and communal responsibility, romance's quest structure allows space for testing the systematic coherence of these virtue-ethics in the peripheries of the metropolitan center. With romance and virtue informing the contours of this dissertation, Spenser's The Faerie Queene provides the foundation. The first chapter begins where Spenser ends, with the virtue of courtesy; this is the same virtue that informs the second chapter. While the second and third chapters discuss Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana and Milton’s Maske, other early poetry and prose tracts, the emphasis is on how their specific philosophical priorities build on the Spenserian model, reworking it for their own specific ends. Hence, these chapters are interwoven with further discussions of Spenser’s texts. Where Spenser and Ralegh propose different versions of courtesy as the ideal virtue for a cosmopolitan Englishman, Milton chooses chastity. In each case, romance assumes different forms and these differences reveal distinct conceptualizations of the virtues that inform the quests. So, too, does the ideal English commonwealth and its relationship to cosmopolitanism transform with each new iteration.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2019
Access Conditions
- Rights
- In Copyright
- Restrictions on Use
- Collection is open for research.
Citation
Zlomke, Minta,
"Cosmopolitanism and the Horizon of Romance: The Poetics of the Nation in Spenser, Ralegh, and Milton"
(2019).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/f4nx-gm97
