Moveable Text: Mutability, Monumentality, and the Representation of Motion in British Renaissance Literature.

摘要

The representation of movement and change in English Renaissance literature was a site of negotiation between conflicting views of the value and efficacy of motion. Renaissance poets made motion visible by referring to other arts, discourses, practices, and disciplines of study where motion was either highly relevant or a topic of debate. Such visibility reveals the fraught nature of motion for Renaissance minds: in the epics of Spenser and Milton, objects move that should be motionless or are described as static when they should be mobile. Such unexpected reversals are appropriate for a period when the whole status and value of motion and stillness was in question. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, motion was seen concurrently as a force of mutability, bringing eventual ruin to all human monuments, as a force of progress, improving all things, and as a force of equilibrium, maintaining a continual cycle of decay and renewal. Motion gave Renaissance poets, including Edmund Spenser and John Milton, a subject not only to think about, but to think with, as motion provided a unifying framework for disparate ideas.;The three parts of the dissertation, each consisting of two chapters, consider motion in increasingly larger dimensions of space and human experience. Part I explores the puzzling frequency with which static artwork in Spenser's Faerie Queene appears to move. Chapter One argues that motion was a chief feature of the classical rhetorical practice of "ekphrasis" (meaning "description"), and as Renaissance poets adapted ancient forms for English verse, they incorporated motion as an essential element of description. Yet they also isolated verbal descriptions of visual art (the modern definition of "ekphrasis") as a separate poetic mode. Chapter Two applies the distinctly Renaissance practice of ekphrasis outlined in the previous chapter to Spenser's poetry, and argues that the ability of ekphrasis to accommodate the tension between flux and fixity present in stories of metamorphosis offers a possible explanation for the centrality of Ovidian episodes as subjects for Spenser's ekphrases. Part II considers the relationship between plotting space and plotting narratives during the Renaissance. Chapter Three argues that, on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century maps, dynamic, narrative features and a lack of roads contributed to an experience of motion, but did little to facilitate actual travel. Chapter Four explores how the narrative features and lack of roads may explain certain discontinuities present in Spenser's description of travel. Part III argues that Milton's image of "grateful vicissitude" (PL 6.8) responds to the contemporary debate over universal decay (Chapter Five), and indicates a larger poetics of motion which Milton developed throughout his career (Chapter Six).