Misanthropoetics: Social flight and literary form in early modern England.

摘要

Misanthropoetics gives name and scope to a previously under-theorized grouping of texts invested in retreat, flight from society, and alienation, and it analyzes the basis in early modern English drama and poetry for the appearance of the uncompromising presence of the misanthrope. This dissertation makes the claim that figures as different as Timon of Athens, Shakespeare's Pericles, Spenser's Timias, and Jonson's Morose, all help to shape this tradition and to formulate the logic of the misanthrope. A neglected figure in investigations of Renaissance form, the misanthrope has long been deprived of theoretical attention as a representational dramatic and poetic entity giving shape and contour to an early modern English imaginary. While the malcontent and the melancholic---cousin figures to the misanthrope---have generated much interest in literary studies, the social dimension of their interaction makes them unsuited to sounding the fullest depths to fantasies of retreat and flight from social centers that would soon grow to have important currency as a thematic mode in modern literatures of the West.; In reading Timon of Athens with Descartes, the first chapter offers a critique of the relief shortly performed by way of the Cartesian cogito, with its fundamental validation of the subjective self. Exploring paternity in both Merchant of Venice and Pericles in chapter two, I argue that the Venetian contempt for Shylock can be understood as stemming from his refusal to disguise the activity of patriarchal commerce with the softer face of humanist familial diplomacy. The lessons excavated from Belmont are applied to the distorted paternity of Pericles, where the incestuous love of daughters becomes a grotesque but inevitable outcome of secret strategies of dynastic and merchant capitalism, leaving Pericles uncommunicative and adrift on the sea. In Book 4 of Spenser's Faerie Queene, Timias is driven to perform a flight from all society. The conflict between reading this flight through the lens of Tudor history versus through allegorical and religious exempla---like that of the Christian anchorite which Timias resembles---generates the textual contradiction characteristic of misanthropy. Finally, in Jonson's Epicoene, the misanthrope's effort to flee is understood in the context of language. Morose, Jonson's silence-seeking misanthrope, withdraws from the confusion generated when Latin grammar helps introduce a proliferation of social genders, where the structure of social authority is bound up with weaknesses and ambiguities of grammatical form. The Epilogue treats satire and misanthropy in Marston's Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image.