Browsing by Subject "British and Irish literature"

At the community of Little Gidding from the late 1620s through the 1640s, in a special room known as the Concordance Chamber, Mary Ferrar, Anna Collett, and their sisters sliced apart printed Bibles and engravings, then pasted them back together into elaborate collages of text and image that harmonize the four gospels into a single narrative. They then bound these books between elaborate covers using a method taught to them by a bookbinder's daughter from Cambridge. The resulting volumes were so meticulously designed that one family member described the process as "a new kind of printing." Collectively, these books are known as the Little Gidding Harmonies, and they are the subject of Cut/Copy/Paste.

By close-reading the Little Gidding Harmonies, Cut/Copy/Paste illuminates a unique Caroline devotional aesthetic in which poets, designers, and printmakers collaboratively explored the capacity of the codex to harmonize sectarianism. Proceeding chronologically, I begin in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods, when women writers like Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney Herbert, and a range of anonymous needleworkers laid the groundwork for the Harmonies' cut-up aesthetic by marrying the language of text-making to textile labor (Chapter 1). Situating women's authorship in the context of needlework restores an appreciation for the significance and centrality of ideologically gendered skills to the process of authoring the Harmonies. Building on this chapter's argument, I turn next to the earliest Harmony to show how the Ferrar and Collett women of Little Gidding, in conversation with their friend George Herbert, used cutting and pasting as a way of bypassing the stigma of print without giving up the validation that publication, as in making public, brings. This early volume attracted the attention of the court, and Little Gidding soon found itself patronized by King Charles, Archbishop Laud, and an elite coterie who saw in the women's cut-and-paste "handiwork" a mechanism for organizing religious dissention (Chapter 2). In response, Little Gidding developed ever more elaborate collages of text and image, transforming their writing practice into a full-fledged devotional aesthetic. This aesthetic came to define the poetry of an under-appreciated network of affiliated writers, from Frances Quarles and Edward Benlowes to Royalist expatriate John Quarles, Mary Ferrar at Little Gidding, and her close friend Richard Crashaw (Chapter 3). It fell out of favor in the eighteenth century, derided by Alexander Pope and others as derivative and populist; yet annotations and objects left in one Little Gidding Harmony during the nineteenth century witness how women, still denied full access to publishing in print, continued to engage with scissors and paste as tools of a proto-feminist editorial practice (Chapter 4). The second half of the last chapter and a digital supplement turn to the Harmonies today to argue for a reorientation of digital humanities, electronic editing, and "new media" studies around deeper histories of materialist or technical tropes of innovation, histories that do not always begin and end with the perpetual avant-gardism of modernity.

This project participates in what has been called the "material turn" in the humanities. As libraries digitize their collections, the material specificity of textual objects - the inlays, paste-downs, typesetting, and typography occluded by print editions - becomes newly visible through high-resolution facsimiles. Cut/Copy/Paste seizes this moment of mass remediation as an opportunity to rethink the categories, concepts, and relationships that define and delimit Renaissance literature. By reading early modern cultural production materially, I reveal the richness of the long-neglected Caroline period as a time of literary experimentation, when communities like Little Gidding and their affiliates developed a multimedia, multimodal aesthetic of devotion. Yet, even as this project mines electronic collections to situate canonical texts within a wider field of media objects and material writing practices, it also acknowledges that digital media obscure as much as they elucidate, flattening three-dimensional book objects to fit the space of the screen. In my close readings and digital supplement, I always return to the polyphonic dance of folds and openings in the Harmonies - to the page as a palimpsest, thickly layered with paper, ink, glue, annotations, and evidence of later readers' interactions with it. By attending to the emergent materiality of the Harmonies over the longue durée, Cut/Copy/Paste both deepens our knowledge of seventeenth-century devotional literature and widens the narrow lens of periodization to consider the role of Little Gidding's cut-up method in past, present, and future media ecologies.

John Milton argued that customs are antithetical to rational judgment. My dissertation, Freedom Under the Law, investigates the conception of rationality that underlies the divorce of tradition and reason in the writings of the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (1642-1660). In this period, republican authors strive to turn English subjects into citizens whose active virtue and rational judgment is unclouded by tradition and habits. This dissertation argues that these writers build their arguments on a paradoxical depiction of the people as both rationally capable of consenting to political association and irrationally bound by custom. In conversation with Alasdair MacIntyre's analysis of the Aristotelian tradition, Freedom Under the Law exposes the tensions that arise in the writings of both canonical and non-canonical seventeenth-century authors as they attempt to re-imagine and represent the individual, the family, and the commonwealth. As this project demonstrates, writers ranging from John Milton to the millenarian John Rogers to the Parliamentarian Henry Parker reveal a residual understanding of political and social community that owes its vocabulary to medieval and classical modes of thinking. However, while Aristotelian models of political association closely link reason, habit, and justice, the authors considered in my project present an understanding of individuals as capable of rational action independent of tradition and custom.

This dissertation traces how this revolutionary account of the individual in political association is expressed through a range of often-conflicting formulations of the English nation. Freedom Under the Law begins with Milton's representation of education in the virtues in his early theatrical piece, Comus (1634). This first chapter establishes the guiding question of the project: how is the relationship between individual and community reconfigured in the literature of the seventeenth-century? In chapters two and three, I situate Milton's domestic and political prose of 1643-49 in the context of Puritan marriage manuals and Parliamentarian and royalist tracts. Through these comparisons, I show that Milton's distrust of customary laws produces a representation of the virtuous individual and the ideal nation as independent of their own history and, ironically, driven to constant iconoclastic self-reformation. Chapter four demonstrates how impoverished accounts of natural law lead to a devaluing of the people's legislative authority in Edward Sexby's call for the killing of Oliver Cromwell in Killing No Murder (1657), apologias of the Cromwellian dissolution of the Parliament in 1653, and the Putney Debates in 1647. Chapter five considers Milton's Readie and Easie Way (1660) alongside Fifth Monarchist pamphlets. This chapter questions J.G.A. Pocock's distinction between a medieval custom-based juristic tradition and a republican understanding of rational political life, a distinction adopted widely in Milton studies. I argue that comparison with Aquinas's Aristotelian account of custom and law brings into relief tensions in Milton's model of rational political participation. Throughout the dissertation, I argue that the conception of virtue and reason adopted by Milton and his contemporaries allows them to dismiss historically-bound embodiments of justice and reason as enslaving accretions.

When debating the structure of the cosmos, Raphael delivers to Adam perhaps Milton's most famous line: "be lowly wise." With the promise to "justify the ways of God to men," Milton does not limit man's knowledge to base matters, but reclaims the heights of "other worlds" for the poet. Over the course of the seventeenth century, the natural philosophers' material explanations of the natural order were slowly gaining authority over other sources of knowledge, the poets prime among them. My dissertation takes up the competing early modern claims to knowledge that Milton lays down for Adam. I argue that natural philosophy, what today we call "science," emerged as the dominant authority over knowledge by appropriating the poet's imagination.

The poet's imagination had long revealed the divine hand that marked nature--a task that, as Sidney put it, merited the poet a "peerlesse" rank among other professions. For Bacon, Galileo, and Royal Society fellows, the poetic imagination revealed material explanations of nature's order that other orthodox models and methods could not. For the first decades of the seventeenth century, the imagination aligned poetry and natural philosophy as complementary pursuits of knowledge: Sidney's poet was to imagine a "golden" world that revealed the divine order, the material cause of which Bacon's natural philosopher was to discover in nature. But as the Royal Society fellows countered the claim that they peddled fancies, they severed ties with the poet. In one ingenious rhetorical move, Royal Society fellows proclaimed themselves to have perfected the poet's imaginative work, securing the imagination for natural philosophy while disavowing poetry as the product of an idle fancy. Such rhetoric proved as powerful then as it does now. For Margaret Cavendish, the poet occupies the supplemental role that "recreate[s] the mind" once it grows tired of the "serious" natural philosophical studies. After the Restoration, then, the important role of the poetic imagination would go largely unrecognized even as it set itself to work in what would become the separate disciplines of literature and science.

Moving beyond traditional conceptions of suicide in Romantic literature as indices of Romanticism's fascination with tragic or mad genius, this dissertation traces how Romantic-era writers also employed the trope of suicide as a political tool to argue for the rationality of individuals without rights, or with limited rights, such as slaves, women, and the poor. In both scholarly and post-Romantic artistic engagements with so-called Romantic suicide, suicide is typically interpreted as neither a critique of an unlivable society, nor even a mark of mental illness, but instead operates as a meta-critique of art itself, suggesting that the artist, by virtue of his creativity, is somehow beyond this world. But by showing how suicide also emerged, in the Romantic period, as a metaphor for challenging social structures associated with liberal individualism, Suicidal Romanticism posits that the emphasis on the link between creative and suicidal proclivities associated with Romanticism, which persists even in our contemporary imagination in spite of social scientific arguments to the contrary, troubles our capacity to talk either about the problem of mental illness or about the social injustices that would drive somebody to want not to live. The Romantic writers examined here--including Thomas Day and John Bicknell, Mary and Percy Shelley, and William Wordsworth--proposed an alternative conception of suicide, positing the need to open the social field to recognize all those who are considered "non-subjects." By using suicide as a metaphor to interrogate the roots of inequality within a social structure based on exclusive individualism, these writers suggest that acts of suicide represent responses not only to private phenomena, but also to social conditions, and that the two are not mutually exclusive. By thus reading Romantic-era discourses of suicide as radical interrogations of liberalism, Suicidal Romanticism also positions Romanticism itself as a response to political questions that first emerged in abolitionist and women's rights discourses of the long eighteenth century.

This dissertation, "Theories of Everything: Science Fiction, Totality, and Empire in the Twentieth Century," argues that the ideology of empire shares with science fiction an essential cognitive orientation towards totality, an affinity which has made science fiction a privileged site for both the promotion and the critique of imperial ideologies in the United States and Britain in the twentieth century. The cultural anxieties that attend a particular moment of empire are especially manifest in that period's science fiction, I argue, because of the importance of science and technology: first as a tool of imperial domination and second as a future-oriented knowledge practice that itself has totalizing aspirations, grasping with one hand towards so-called "theories of everything" while with the other continually decentering and devaluing humanity's importance in larger cosmic history. As technological modernity begins to develop horizons of power and knowledge increasingly beyond the scale of the human, I argue, science fiction becomes an increasingly important cognitive resource for navigating the ideological environments of modern political subjects.

In particular I argue for a new understanding of the science fiction genre focused on an aspiration to totality: cognitive maps of the historical world-system on a immense, even hyperbolically cosmic, scale. In the twentieth century empire itself is one such totality, insofar as imperial ideology asserts the existence of a historical logic of progress that ultimately culminates in the empire itself. Such totalities necessarily provoke thoughts of their own inevitable negation, an eventuality I organize around the general category of "apocalypse." In three chapters I consider apocalyptic texts concerning entropy and evolution (chapter one), environmental collapse and ecological futurity (chapter two), and zombie catastrophe (chapter 3). In particular I focus on literary work from Isaac Asimov, H. G. Wells, Mark Twain, Olaf Stapledon, Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Robert Kirkman, Joss Whedon, Ted Chiang, and Philip K. Dick. I ultimately argue that the totalizing thought experiments of science fiction have functioned as a laboratory of the mind for empire's proponents and detractors alike, offering a "view from outside" from which the course of history might be remapped and remade. As a result--far from occupying some literary periphery--I argue science fiction in fact plays a central role in political struggles over history, empire, identity, justice, and the future itself.