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theses

This dissertation theorizes a new understanding of “imitation,” the central objective and operation early modern writers prescribed for fiction, better known in the period as “poesy.” Reading poems, plays, and fictional prose from canonical authors, John Donne, William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton, Francis Bacon, and Margaret Cavendish, I uncover expressions of imitation as a process that cultivates not resemblance but disorder: disassembly and (sometimes) recombination. The texts I study thus portray procedures of fiction-making that literary theorists—from classical antiquity to the present day—have not acknowledged, but procedures that enabled the early modern version of imitation: poesy should not merely copy nature but should create or make it anew. Over the course of the seventeenth century, disorder became a new method by which fiction imitated nature. This method for imitation became especially appropriate in this century, when natural philosophers, like Bacon, began to confront how little they knew certainly about nature, that nature was a system of constant variety, generation, and creation. My re-definition of imitation as disorder illuminates that poesy captured this truth about nature through, what I call, literature’s “poetics of disorder.” “Poetics of disorder” are the strategies by which poesy creates ongoing variety and change—through specific literary devices, like the metaphysical conceit, or, in Cavendish’s estimation, by recreating, diverting, and withdrawing. Imitating nature’s dynamism, this poetics shows both that trying to map nature’s processes—as natural philosophers strove to do—was and is not the only way to demonstrate understanding of nature and that literature is not simply a frivolous exercise of style or imagination, but a knowledge-making enterprise in its own right.

ETD_11542

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

ETD doctoral

doi:10.7282/t3-4y2q-m349

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