Skeptical seductions: Carpe diem, materialism, and doubt in English Renaissance literature.

摘要

Skeptical Seductions: Carpe Diem, Materialism, and Doubt in English Renaissance Literature is concerned with the philosophical underpinnings of that most seemingly trivial of literary forms, the erotic carpe diem of the English Renaissance. Critics have often read sixteenth- and seventeenth-century carpe diem poems through the lens of their classical predecessors in Horace and Catullus: as light-hearted invitations to pleasure. But the mode's affectation of cheerful concupiscence is undercut, I argue, in myriad ways: in the morbidity of its imagery, in its obsessive fixation on the meaning of virginity, and, above all, in its displacement of the Christian afterlife with a vision of materialist vacuity. While the mode in all eras emphasizes the brevity of life for didactic or prurient means, in the Renaissance the dialectical potential of carpe diem is exploited for the first time, thereby creating a discursive space for debate---not just between clever rakes and reluctant maidens, but between carnal love and Platonic love, idealization and empiricism, orthodoxy and doubt.; The project addresses carpe diem's breadth as well as depth by looking at the workings of carpe diem in diverse literary kinds. In chapters on the lyricists (especially Marvell and Herrick), Marlowe's Hero and Leander, Books II and III of The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, and Milton's Comus, I explore the workings of carpe diem in lyric, erotic epyllion, romance, dramatic comedy, and the masque, respectively. Throughout, the project considers the uncanny prominence---in exercises ostensibly about sex and lust---of images of desiccation and death. I find that carpe diem's macabre "deserts of vast Eternity" and "decaying" lovers make it a form particularly receptive to the language of materialism and even skepticism. My approach does not discount the erotic appeal of carpe diem, recognized and appreciated by centuries of readers. Rather, it argues that the thrill of these poems comes, at least in part, from their staging the very rhetoric of iconoclasm and disbelief as seductive.