Literary heroism and the economies of excess, 1650-1750.

Students of Milton, Dryden, Pope, and their culture sometimes find an exaggerated faith in military heroism, while other critics discover an equally virulent anti-heroism. This dissertation, which interprets epics, epic translations, panegyrics, rhymed plays, and non-fiction prose, unites these opposite evaluations of heroism by seeing the heroic idea from 1650 to 1750 as inherently a contradiction: a force that exceeds containment must nonetheless be contained; a hero who surpasses social norms should nonetheless serve and submit to society; and finally, an excessive violence is asked to limit and cancel itself out, thus terminating in peace. The ambivalence toward the hero arises from and speaks to a history of power, violence, and personal greatness, a history in which each strong military leader after Cromwell raises the specter of military dictatorship. The stabilization of a constitutional monarchy under William III helps to guard the social order from heroic self-assertion, whether as tyranny or as usurpation. But a more profound solution emerges from the economic order developing after 1688. As such writers as Charles Davenant and Bernard Mandeville see the wars of William and Anne enmeshed in an economy of speculation and credit, they imagine the hero as produced within and by a complex social structure. This study thus traces the shift from a "primitivist" model of heroism, wherein the hero stands outside society in the customary position of the savage, to an "economic" model, in which the hero or heroic poet becomes an effect of a social condition larger than himself.PhDEnglish Language and LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/103564/1/9332040.pdfDescription of 9332040.pdf : Restricted to UM users only