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My thesis explores the posthumous literary life in the early modern period by examining responses to ‘dead poets’ shortly after their deaths. Analysing responses to a series of literary figures, I chart a pre-history of literary biography. Overall, I argue for the gradual emergence of a linkage between an individual’s literary output and the personal life that predates the eighteenth century. Chapter 1 frames the critical investigation by contrasting examples of Lives written for authors living before and after my chosen period of specialisation. Both these Lives reflect changed attitudes towards the writing of poets’ lives as a result of wider discourses that the following chapters examine in more detail. Chapter 2 focuses on the events following the death of Robert Greene, an author often described as the first ‘professional’ English writer. The chapter suggests that Greene’s notoriety is for the most part a posthumous construct resulting from printed responses to his death. Chapter 3 is concerned with the problem of reconciling a poet’s life-narrative with the vita activa model and examines potential causes for the ‘gap’ between Sir Philip Sidney’s public life and his works, which continues to pose a challenge for biographers. Chapter 4 examines the evolution of Izaak Walton’s Life of Donne. The ‘life history’ of Walton’s Lives, particularly the Life of Donne, reflects an accidental discovery of a biographical technique that anticipates literary biography. My method is mainly based on bibliographical research, comparing editions and making distinctions between them which have not been made before, while paying particular attention to paratextual materials, such as dedications, prefaces and title pages. By investigating assumptions about individual authors, and also authorship in general, I hope to shed some light on a promising new area of early modern scholarship and direct greater scrutiny towards the assumptions brought into literary biography.

本文旨在闡明史賓塞如何架構出一則阿諦構和布烈特瑪間的完美愛情故事並鼓勵那些活在真實世界中的讀者跟隨這對戀人的腳蹤。本文首先介紹基督教中的愛論如何建基於神人之間完美的愛，並介紹史賓塞如何以神聖之愛為典範，寫出一對完美的愛人。藉此典範,史賓塞拆毀了兩座巨牆:他不但使人可以有完美的愛情，也使他的人物同時具有寓言和寫實兩大特性.此外、本文亦說明基督教愛論和其實現間的環狀關係如和使史賓塞的愛情故事和基督教的愛論亦產生環狀關係。第二、本文細探阿諦構和布烈特瑪間關係的發展、將之分為三個階段:為愛人、為夫妻、為朋友。在這三階段中、此愛情故事皆和基督教的愛論有環狀關係:此故事反映了神聖之愛的光華、釋明了神聖之愛的迷團、並藉著神聖之愛的特異處將此愛情故事中似乎不完美處解釋為完美。藉著探討史賓塞的愛情故事和基督教愛論彼此間的環狀關係、本文終能釐清史賓塞如何促使讀者基督教中認為人可以行出的貞潔。本文最後呈現史賓塞的環狀辯論如何鼓勵讀者不僅閱讀阿諦構和布烈特瑪的經驗、並能親身嘗試實行這對愛人的信念。 / This thesis aims at explaining how Spenser builds his love story of Artegall and Britomart as a perfect love model for all his readers in the real world to follow. The thesis first introduces how the Christian theory of love is modeled on the perfect love relation between God and human beings and how Spenser emulates that divine model and creates a pair of perfect human lovers. By his emulation of the divine model, he not only breaks down the middle wall between the perfect and the human, but also shapes his characters as both allegorical and realistic. Besides, the thesis also explains how the circular relationship between the Christian theory of love and its practice renders Spenser's artistic love model to have a circular relatioinship with theChristian love theory, too. Second, the argument of the thesis follows closely the development of Artegall and Britomart's relationship and divides it into three phases: their relationship as lovers, as husband and wife, as friends. In all the three phases, the love story has a circular relationship with the Christian theory oflove. It reflects the glory of a divine love model, explains the mystery of Christian love, and is justified of its seeming defects by the harshness andother-worldliness of the divine love. By laying bare of the circularrelationship between Spenser's love story and the Christian theory of love, the thesis finally comes to unravel Spenser's art of inviting the readers toperform chastity that human beings in Christian theory is supposed perform. Thethesis concludes by showing how the circular argument encourages the readers to join in Artegall and Britomart's experience and to practice their belief about love rather than simply to read it.

If we consider the representation of the body in the epic-romances of Torquato Tasso, Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser, certain instances of wounding and laceration emerge as crucial turning points in the development of their respective narratives: Clorinda’s redemptive mutilation, Parthenia’s blood-drenched pallor, Amavia’s disquieting suicide, Venus’s insatiable orifice, Amoret’s “perfect hole.” This thesis affords a detailed comparative study of such passages, contending that the wound assumed a critical metaphoric dimension in sixteenth-century epic-romance literature, particularly in relation to the perceived association between body condition and erotic desire. Along with its function as a marker of martial valor and somatic sacredness, the wound, I argue, increasingly is designated in these epic-romances as an interiorizing apparatus, one liable to accrue at any instance into a surplus of unanticipated meaning. As such, the wound becomes an emblem in these texts of what I call the phenomenology of desire—the equation of consummation and loss—as well as the aesthetic and metaphoric mechanism by which these writers seek to overcome it. The four chapters of this thesis constitute individual but cumulative points of response to the problem of thinking about desire as a type of wound. For Tasso, a wound poses a challenge to physical, psychological, and spiritual integrity, but its remarkable capacity for aestheticization also allows Tasso to envision it as a synthesizer of sacred and erotic affects. For Sidney, the prospect that a wound could define a body as courageous or pathetic, as sacred or corrupt, became both politically and socially troubling, and the New Arcadia, I argue, proleptically attempts to defend Sidney against interpretations of wounds that register them as manifestations of corrupt desire. For Spenser, body fracture and erotic wounding are analogic (indeed, almost indistinguishable), and The Faerie Queene investigates the prospect that confusing these analogies can become an empowering, even revelatory experience. In each of these epic-romances, a wound serves both a literal and a figurative function and, in this way, is established as the foremost image by which these writers imagine strength and mutilation, affect and heroism, epic and romance as being inextricably bound.

In his Book of the Courtier, Castiglione appeals to the Renaissance notion of self-fashioning, the idea that individuals could shape their identity rather than relying solely on the influence of external factors such as birth, social class, or fate. While other early modern authors explore the practice of self-fashioning—Niccolò Machiavelli, for example, surveys numerous princes identifying ways they have molded themselves—Castiglione emphasizes the necessity of modeling one's-self after a variety of sources, "[taking] various qualities now from one man and now from another." In this way, Castiglione advocates for a self-fashioning grounded in a discriminating kind of synthesis, the generation of a new ideal form through the selective combination of various source materials. While Castiglione focuses on the moves necessary for an individual to fashion himself through this act of discriminatory mimesis, his views can explain the ways authors of the period use source material in the process of textual production. As poets and playwrights fashioned their texts, they did so by consciously combining various source materials in order to create not individuals, as Castiglione suggests, but characters to represent new cultural ideals and values. Early moderns viewed the process of textual, as well as cultural production, as a kind of synthesis. Creation through textual fusion is particularly common in early modern accounts of the heroic, in which authors synthesize classical conceptions of the hero, which privilege the completion of martial feats, and Christian notions of the heroic, based on the contemplative nature of Christ. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how Thomas Kyd in The Spanish Tragedy (1585), Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene (1590), William Shakespeare in Titus Andronicus (1594), and John Milton in A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle (1632) syncretized classical and Christian notions of the heroic ideal in order to comment upon and shape political, social, and literary discourses. By recognizing this fusion of classical heroism with contemplative heroism, we gain a more nuanced understanding of the reception of classical ideas within an increasingly secular society.

This thesis traces the use of pity in early modern English literature, highlighting in particular the ways in which the emotion prompted personal anxieties and threatened Burckhardtian notions of the self-contained, autonomous individual, even as it acted as a central, crucial component of personal identity. The first chapter considers pity in medieval drama, and ultimately argues that the institutional changes that took place during the Reformation ushered in a new era, in which people felt themselves to be subjected to interpersonal emotions – pity especially – in new, overwhelming, and difficult ways. The remaining three chapters examine how pity complicates questions of personal identity in Renaissance literature. Chapter Two discusses the masculine bid for pity in courtly lyric poetry, including Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella and Barnabe Barnes's Parthenophil and Parthenophe, and considers the undercurrents of vulnerability and violation that emerge in the wake of unanswered emotional appeals. This chapter also examines these themes in Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Sidney's Arcadia. Chapter Three also picks up the element of violation, extending it to the pitiable presentation of sexual aggression in Lucrece narratives. Chapter Four explores the recognition of suffering and vulnerability across species boundaries, highlighting the use of pity to define humanity against the rest of the animal kingdom, and focusing in particular on how these questions are handled by Shakespeare in The Tempest and Ben Jonson, in Bartholomew Fair. This work represents the first extended study of pity in early modern English literature, and suggests that the emotion had a constitutive role in personal subjectivity, in addition to structuring various forms of social relation. Ultimately, the thesis contends that the early modern English interest in pity indicates a central worry about vulnerability, but also, crucially, a belief in the necessity of recognising shared, human weakness.