The Island Nation and Its Discontents: Transnationalism in English Renaissance Literature from Shakespeare to Milton
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Gadaleto, Michael Joseph
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- July 20, 2018
- Committee Members:
- David Loewenstein, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
David Loewenstein, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Patrick Cheney, Committee Member
Garrett Sullivan, Committee Member
Daniel Beaver, Outside Member - Keywords:
- English Renaissance Literature
Transnationalism
Island Studies
Nationalism
Shakespeare
Milton
European History - Abstract:
- This dissertation reassesses the ways in which nascent English nationhood and identity are represented and constructed in the literary works of four early modern English writers. Literary-historical scholars have long explored Renaissance authors’ investment both in “writing” the then emerging English nation through their imaginative texts and in rethinking the question of that polity’s identity. The present study, however, deepens and complicates this literary analysis of English nationhood by approaching such questions from a wider European perspective, turning and contributing to the recent critical discourse of transnationalism in order to show how English authors insistently, if variously, defined an amorphous “England” in relation to and in terms of their Continental and archipelagic neighbors—neighbors whose own developing identities were often seen as closely related (and even troublingly identical) to England’s. By focusing on a key paradigm of English national discourse—that of the elect island nation—I show how Renaissance authors, through their investigations of different facets of England’s hybrid history, actually challenge this bounded and often chauvinist isolationist archetype by imagining more internationalist and participatory models of nationhood, models that stress England’s historical and present ties to lands, cultures, and peoples beyond its island shores. Necessarily, such transnational literary thinking also involves reconceptions of national identity and subjectivity, so that just what it means to be an early modern “English” or “British” subject in a world with Others is profoundly redefined in Shakespeare’s skeptical exploration of Anglo-French or Angevin history; in Spenser’s poetic exploration of a “mingled” Anglo-Irish history and of his own hybridic colonial-literary identity; in Greville’s reflections on his lost friendship with Sidney and of his commitment to an Anglo-Dutch republicanism; and in Milton’s recovery of an Italian civic humanism that proves key to his fashioning of “John Milton, Englishman.”