The forms of nature: poetry and the limits of politics in early modern England

This dissertation examines how ideas drawn from early modern poetics were integral to narratives of the founding moments of political obligation that shaped the development of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political thought. George Puttenham claimed that the origins of all political communities derived from the work of the poet: “poesie” came “before any civil society was among men”; moreover, it was the “original cause and occasion of their first assemblies.” For early modern writers, pastoral in particular exemplified poetry’s ability to frame ways of thinking about political communities and their origins. Poets such as Spenser, Shakespeare, Marvell, and Milton recognized that pastoral’s depictions of landscapes that were removed from the centers of power allowed them to trace representations of what I call “extrapolitical” moments in early modern literature: forms of collective life that arise outside normative institutional structures and imagine alternative foundations for political membership. Spenser’s Faerie Queene shows that allegorical reading takes the place of legal judgment within its lawless romance and pastoral terrains, while exile in Shakespeare’s As You Like It forces characters excluded from the court to invent new ideas of collective obligation through the resources of pastoral drama. Marvell’s Upon Appleton House and Milton’s Paradise Lost experiment with pastoral lyric conventions to imagine idyllic domestic spaces and relationships that expand theological arguments about prelegal forms of government. These writers use pastoral not merely as a genre, defined by its recognizable figures, themes, and situations, but as a mode of inquiry that penetrated a wide range of literary forms, from epic, to allegorical romance, georgic, and lyric. Furthermore, pastoral served as a versatile apparatus for examining how concerns central to literary studies – including invention, mediation, and affect – were integral to political philosophy’s claims about the sources of our obligations to other humans and to the natural world.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Stephanie Elizabeth Hun