The ethics of form: politics, the passions, and genre formation in Renaissance England

2016-07-11This dissertation investigates the social, political, and psychological influences on literary genre formation in early modern England. Taking a cue from Sir Philip Sidney’s discussions of genre in the Defense of Poesie, my project constructs a theory of genre that responds to the interconnection of sociological conditions and theories of psychological affect, which in the early modern period were generally known as “passions.” I argue that writers of genres new to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries first identified particular psychological affects as important to the reception of their work, and in response developed poetic techniques designed specifically to engage those passions. Over time, these techniques became conventions of the developing genre as later writers appropriated them for their own work in that genre. In my study of tragicomedy, utopian fiction, overseas travelogues, and interregnum anthologies known as “fancies,” I examine the work of writers as influential as William Shakespeare, Sir Thomas More, Sir Francis Bacon, and John Dryden as well as lesser known figures such as John Fletcher, Philip Massinger, and Margaret Cavendish