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theses

The following study illuminates a set of failed responses to social and political problems sedimented, personified, and explored through the “malcontent,” a politically charged word borrowed from French politics that became a key social and literary type in early modern England. Much prior criticism has approached typology as a set of static signs to be catalogued; instead, this study traces the role of the malcontent in an evolving inquiry in England at the turn of the seventeenth century into questions of injustice, participatory politics, tyranny, and political stability. The end of the Elizabethan and beginning of the Jacobean eras was a time of great fear and anxiety, forging these questions of abstract political philosophy into matters of immediate, pressing concern. Attending to the historical and literary contexts of exemplary malcontents (both historical persons and literary figures), the study demonstrates that far from being a static figure, the malcontent was a flexible hermeneutic for syncretically fusing multiple discourses: much as Drew Daniel has described “melancholy” as a Deleuzian “assemblage,” the politicized malcontent subset of melancholics acts almost as a rubics cube for early modern thinkers to examine the confluences and consequences of shifting arrangements of ideas. Because these early modern writers deployed poetry and theater as methodologies of political philosophy, this study, too, requires an analytical hermeneutic which views literature and politics as coextensive or co-constitutive, while at the same time reserving the paradoxical possibility that they might also be mutually exclusive. Therefore, the study adopts the frameworks of two philosophers, Nietzsche and Aristotle, who extensively considered the intersection of literature and political philosophy; using the parameters of these competing philosophical frameworks, this study develops interpretations of malcontent literary experiments from Philip Sidney to William Shakespeare that are in conversation with the history of Western political thought while remaining acutely attentive to their historical specificity. The purpose of this study is thus twofold: I seek to develop a deeper and more nuanced account of some of the most pessimistic literary thought of the early modern period, what we might view as a “negative politics”; and in so doing, I hope to provide the reader with reflections of our own moment of political polarization and anxiety, as well as challenges to some of our most cherished political assumptions, many of which emerged from the more optimistic writing of this period.

ETD_10379

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-7bwb-g949

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.