TY - JOUR TI - "Art gave lifeless life": living art and the nature of fiction in early modern England DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-ekmc-zf29 PY - 2020 AB - What can representations of intense experiences of the imagination—the feeling that poems, books, paintings, and statues are alive—tell us about the status of fictional entities in the early modern period? How does the dominant narrative of poetry as mimesis change when we take into consideration the era’s fixation with animated art? My dissertation claims that the early modern fascination with what I call “living art” made it possible to articulate a nascent form of aesthetic experience and a theory of fiction. Early modern literary texts offer complex meditations on how readers emotionally identify with imaginative worlds even though they lacked a name or aesthetic category to describe these feelings. Because the early modern period lacks the art criticism that was common in the eighteenth century, I read the ways that literature theorizes its own practice and effects, arguing that literature produces some of the most complex portraits of aesthetic experiences and should be considered on par with philosophical treatises. I take seriously the early modern claim that living art feels actual in order to explore whether the intensity of aesthetic experience leads to a level of instantiation or actuality that goes beyond representation or fictional reference. Each chapter considers whether literature or art requires actualization in order to materially transform issues from gender to politics. This dissertation, then, looks forward to theories of performativity and to theories of aesthetics that are amenable to a performative perspective. While the texts I examine here anticipate theories of linguistic performativity, this dissertation suggests that early modern writers were not restricted to language as a conduit for action. Instead, I argue that a character’s aesthetic experience with the art form activates and reinforces performativity and can be constituted through the process of aesthetic experience. For early modernists, art and literature seem alive not because they represent reality but because they are active forces in the world. KW - Early modern KW - Literatures in English LA - English ER -