Reading and Reception in Early Modern England: Aesthetics, Judgment, and Selfhood from Sidney to Milton.

"Reading and Reception in Early Modern England" contends that early modern subjectivity was invented in the indeterminate space between reader and text, and defined within, around, and against the textual encounter. Early modern debates about reception were, I argue, also debates about the powers of the subject. Questions about freedom of choice, imaginative autonomy, self-evaluation, and the relationship between sensation and thought were all key aspects of an ongoing early modern conversation about receptive experience. The poets and critics upon whom I focus interrogated, debated, and revised the contours of private mental experience through a dense, contradictory, and ever-evolving discourse of literary reception. The literary sphere offered these poets a range of unique theoretical possibilities: in its embrace of indeterminacy and its liberation from the constraints of the normative and the polemical, literature functioned as an arena of radical conceptual free play. Thus the poets I consider were able to establish reception as the fundamental act of the early modern subject while depicting, at the same time, the contradictions, inconsistencies, and elusive aspects of a receptive theory still under development. Between 1580 and 1670, English poets and critics engaged in a reconsideration of the powers, limitations, and responsibilities of the reader, a reconsideration that culminated in a new emphasis on critical engagement as the first duty of the receptive subject. The mid-seventeenth-century reader, earlier the receptive object of somatic appeal, was newly re-imagined as a self-conscious arbiter of poetry’s content. The emergence of this self-sufficient readerly ideal meant that anxiety about internal self-regulation and the proper limits of bodily experience, which had dominated writing about poetry and the self during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, shifted to the realm of public interaction, where the central concerns about selfhood became questions about the proper exercise of judgment in a social world. By making new claims for the autonomy of the reader, the poets upon whom I focus shaped sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ideas about perceptual experience, intellectual freedom, and the powers of the self.Ph.D.English Language & LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/86552/1/rwiseman_1.pd