In the seventeenth century, Puritans would record detailed accounts of their lives, searching for signs of salvation—or damnation—in their everyday experiences. But given the highest possible stakes, these texts are remarkably inventive, wry, and skeptical about the reliability of autobiography itself. Case-studies of Thomas Browne, Richard Norwood, and Laurence Clarkson show how the autobiographies’ speculative fictions and stylized picaresque detachment baffle the expectations of confessional identity. In very different ways, John Milton and John Bunyan demonstrate a knowing skepticism about spiritual autobiography as a forthright transcription of belief and experience. Milton’s career-long anxiety about and attraction to autobiography—always inherently an account before God—critiques the genre’s propensity for self-justification and continual refashioning. Bunyan’s Grace Abounding works as a complex and deeply ironical pastoral instrument. By playing with the anti-narrative premise of Calvinism—the fixed status of one’s election—Bunyan modulates readerly identification and authorial self-aggrandizement, ensuring that the artistry of his “paradigmatic” spiritual autobiography would be inimitable. Breaking the fundamental rules of their genre every time, all of these writers give us new ways to think about their influence on narrative aesthetics and the complex nature of religious belief in the early modern period.

Abstract

Against Arcadia: English Mock-Pastoral and Mock-Georgic, 1660-1740

by Brad Quentin Boyd

Doctor of Philosophy in English

University of California, Berkeley

Professor James Grantham Turner, Chair

Against Arcadia: English Mock-Pastoral and Mock-Georgic, 1660-1740 is a study of the receptions of the ancient Greek and Roman genres or modes of pastoral and georgic in the British nations and Ireland by poets of the Restoration and early eighteenth century, in particular Andrew Marvell, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Jonathan Swift, John Gay, and Alexander Pope. It argues that the traditional and still-dominant literary history of pastoral and georgic in English, which sees these poetic forms in terminal decline after the deaths of the "last Renaissance poets," John Milton and Andrew Marvell, is mistaken, and seeks to reconfigure that history.

In the case of pastoral, most readers have proceeded from a mistaken belief that arcadian or soft pastoral, marked by idealizing, sentimental, romance conventions, was the traditional nature of this poetic form and that the waning of poetry of this kind after 1660 thus represented the decline and fall of pastoral. This study argues on the contrary that such arcadian accretions to the main trunk of Graeco-Roman and medieval pastoral in fact date primarily from the widespread popularity of Jacopo Sannazaro's Arcadia and other "soft" pastoral Renaissance texts, and that Rochester, Swift, Gay, and Pope, by their vibrant retrieval of the thematic and contextual reference of ancient pastoral, especially its paradigmatic practitioners Theocritus and Vergil, reactivate the traditional nature of the genre: pastoral had in fact always been highly ironized, philosophically skeptic, and often scabrously sexualized, surprisingly "modern" almost two thousand years before modernity.

In the case of georgic, this study argues, a similar misprision has traditionally led literary history to suppose that the earnest true georgics of the eighteenth century (didactic and landscape-descriptive poems by Philips, Somervile, Thomson, Dyer, Grainger, Jago) were the direct descendants of Hesiodic and especially Vergilian georgic. In fact, this study argues, it is the mock-georgics of Marvell, Rochester, Swift, Gay, and Pope that lay the best claim to that identity, marked as they are not only by ancient georgic's irony, skepticism of ideas of natural innocence and ease, and consciousness of the dislocations and losses of civil and foreign war, in sharp contrast to the earnest, naturalist or optimist, and progressive themes of eighteenth-century true georgics (which are not in this sense "true" at all). Instead, informed in Marvell's case by the experience of the defeat of the republican and Whig cause at the Restoration, and in the case of Swift, Gay, and Pope by the aftermath of the Stuart dynasty's major reverses in 1688 and 1714, they imagine and satirize a landscape, and cityscape, that are gradually descending to political and cultural ruin.

My project on early modern Anglo-Spanish literary relations and apocalyptic thought, “‘What if this present were the world’s last night?’: The Poetics of Early Modern English Apocalyptic Hispanophobia,” posits a new model of Renaissance cultural transmission and reception. Against the pressure, then and now, to treat English and Spanish literary cultures as fundamentally incompatible outside the context of imperial rivalry, I recover a deceptively familiar discursive mode operating in both Protestant and Catholic Reformations—apocalypse—to highlight how the English apocalyptic imagination redefined its national literary canon by producing unexpected trans-national cultural formulations.

In a time when England saw its national identity and its political future tied to the outcome of its military rivalry with Spain, English authors cast their nationalist Hispanophobia in increasingly apocalyptic terms. By “apocalypse” I mean two things: the first is the theological discourse on the “last things”—death, resurrection, judgement, heaven, and hell; the second is the realignment of the temporal and spiritual order of things as they approached a cataclysmic end-point. Both of these understandings were current in the early modern period due to their intuitive accessibility and their prevalence in theological disputations on the subject. Perceived as an imminent threat, Spain became a natural prism for a plurality of English apocalyptic views. Yet far from just being the inevitably fanciful clearinghouse of Anglo-Spanish antagonism, apocalypticism in the early modern period, I argue, was the very site for negotiating and assimilating points of cultural difference into innovative literary formations. As I show in a new reception history of Spanish lyric, romance, and satire in England, the most outspoken English Hispanophobes conscripted Spanish texts and contexts, keenly attending to Spanish literary form, to launch their invective: Philip Sidney and John Donne took lyrics from Garcilaso de la Vega, Juan Boscán, and Jorge de Montemayor, while Royalists James Turner and Roger L’Estrange imitated translated Francisco de Quevedo’s apocalyptic satires. By invoking the countervailing powers of the apocalyptic moment—destruction and reconstitution—English poets fashioned themselves as nationalist prophets and doomsayers whose poetic making transformed Spanish literature into a natural vehicle for rearticulating England’s evolving literary and political identity.

My first chapter, the general introduction, begins by tracing the origins of English apocalyptic Hispanophobia to the realignment of English apocalyptic history in the mid sixteenth century spurred by military encounters with Spain. Hysteria over the Spanish siege of Antwerp and a heightened apocalyptic spirituality surrounding the Spanish Armada, I argue, franchised tropes of apocalyptic Hispanophobia in the conventional repertoire of any aspiring poet of Tudor and Stuart Britain. Inspired by the many potential Spanish Armageddons that never actually came to pass, aspiring English poets saturated the Elizabethan court with figurative depictions of doomsday. English authors grafted the mixed forms of the Spanish “tragicomedy” and the metrically heterogeneous Spanish lyrics, creating their own English versions of these “mungrell” works. But this grafting created a problem. By conscripting literary forms from Spain, English authors assumed a stance contrary to the Renaissance literary conventions of unity and decorum derived from Aristotle and Horace, eschewing a linear vector of classical inheritance and imitatio. By theorizing the extraordinary power of prophetic authorship, I argue, English authors fashioned a more polyvalent understanding of literary influence. Across the chapters of my project, I show how English literary history was transformed by its own apocalyptic conception of cultural contact with Spain.

The second chapter, “Sir Philip Sidney: The ‘Courtier Prophet’ and His Legacy,” shows how Sidney redefines prophecy against the practice of historical hermeneutics—divining the course of history from sacred texts—and Puritan millenarianism in favor of embracing poetry’s objective power to participate in creation, with the foregone conclusion that what can be brought together can be unmade and vice versa. In his quintessential treatise on English poetics, The Defence of Poesy, Sidney slyly decouples key characteristics of prophecy from religious poetry, opening up the possibility of associating certain qualities of the secular poet with prophetic creation. In doing so, Sidney’s treatise takes aim at Spain, staking the surprising claim that his native letters are uniquely equipped to avoid the deficiencies of the Spanish vernacular because English tolerates mixing especially well. Despite such bluster, however, I show how the sonnet fad and the continuations of narrative romances that Sidney respectively inspired with Astrophil and Stella and the Arcadia were sourced from Jorge de Montemayor’s La Diana, even as they helped popularize anti-Spanish references and figures in the works of countless other poets working in nearly every generic category. Sidney’s death at the hands of the Spanish in 1586 did not prevent his literary coterie from further mining the Spanish works Sidney preferred to cement his literary legacy as the preeminent Elizabethan man of letters.

In the third chapter, “‘Antes muerto que mudado’: John Donne’s Apocalyptic Hispanophobia,” I show how John Donne draws from the same Spanish authors as Sidney, inheriting a complex ideological tapestry surrounding the purchase of the Spanish literary debt. Often thought to have held an unequivocally affirmative view of Spain due to his Catholic upbringing, I trace how Donne’s Hispanophobia shadowed his evolution from a libertine to a religious poet. For Donne to ask “What if this present were the world’s last night?” at the opening of his Holy Sonnet is to resurrect the question of Spanish eschatology from his earlier erotic poetry. I examine Donne as an apocalyptic wartime poet, whose own hostile encounters as a soldier fighting in Spain propel his theological lexicon of apocalyptic equivocation in his Sermons and in the Pseudo-Martyr. I argue that the crisis of conversion long understood to be manifested in Donne’s Holy Sonnets is a crisis of collapsing an English identity with the Spanish ethno-cultural other, framed in Donne’s unique apocalyptic figurations.

The fourth chapter, “Francisco de Quevedo’s Baroque Eschatology and Seventeenth-Century English Royalist Satire,” illustrates how the apocalyptic satire of the English Revolution was not a hermetically bound product of a reactionary royalist anti-Puritanism, but that it emerged from a line of anti-Spanish satire from decades past. Remarkably, the same continuations of anti-Spanish satire are accomplished by translating and imitating the Spanish author Francisco de Quevedo’s own apocalyptic satires. English royalists channeled their affinity for apocalyptic satire through Quevedo’s “The Dream of the Last Judgement” and “The Vision of Hell,” both directed at the Spanish nobility and the declining bureaucracy that supported it. After the outbreak of the English Civil War, the enduring popularity of Quevedian satire began to reflect how England internalized the aesthetic of the Spanish other—the baroque—into its own increasingly divided aesthetic discourse. I argue that Quevedo’s satires, circulating in translation in England, France, and the Low Countries, functioned as a circular apocalyptic epistle that exiled English royalists, through their own translations and continuations, mobilized to illuminate the terrors of the Thirty Years War as a backdrop to the English Puritan millenarian vision.

The Government of the Senses is a study of how the changes in aesthetic culture that occurred in the wake of empiricism operated as regulating social processes. Tracking the rise of a new concern with tastefulness as well as various approaches to aesthetic detachment, I describe how these critical discourses translated into different styles of subjectification. Each chapter identifies figural representations in literature and visual culture that reflect what it felt like to participate in the new aesthetic culture. Chapter One describes the new interest in ideas of taste and “gust” in John Milton’s work and models of aesthetic detachment in John Dryden, showing how Lord Shaftesbury and Joseph Addison developed these models of aesthetic behavior into a comprehensive social program. Chapter Two argues for a continuity between the cultivation of pleasure in the Restoration libertine discourse of Lord Rochester and George Etherege and the eighteenth-century cultivation of aesthetic pleasures. I show the importance of the fop character type in the transition to socially acceptable enjoyments: at the center of ambivalence about cultural consumption, the fop is the first figure that condenses the experience of modern aesthetic subjectivity. Chapter Three follows the inner sense tradition, arguing that Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe narrates an aesthetic self-fashioning by testing the limits of detachment from social life. This wildly popular novel shows how culturally relevant the new aesthetic culture had become beyond the stratified elites. Chapter Four studies the emergence of a socially intelligible figure of the person of taste between Jonathan Richardson’s theory of connoisseurship and the major statements on the standard of taste in the 1750s. It shows that the methods, tensions, and models of authority associated with the new aesthetics were most fully exemplified in the literary career of Alexander Pope. Methodologically, this project studies the regulating effects of aesthetics using Michel Foucault’s late theory of “governmentality” and it describe aesthetics as a self-sustaining social process using the theory of Niklas Luhmann. The chapters also include discussions of the Cartesian theory of pleasure, Hobbesian psychology, the theory of the je ne sais quoi of Dominique Bouhours, the models of conduct in Baltasar Gracián and the Chevalier de Méré, John Locke on secondary qualities and self-education, inner sense theory in Ralph Cudworth and Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith on self-regulation, William Hogarth on utility, and the theories of taste in Edmund Burke, Alexander Gerard, and David Hume. I show that the first phase of modern British aesthetics fashioned a coherent model for the conduct of conduct using the intensities of the sensitive body.