Sugar, Gabrielle (Author)
This dissertation investigates the impact of new cosmic knowledge on early modern literature by examining how playwrights and prose writers from John Lyly (1588) to Christiaan Huygens (1698) react to the astronomical theories of Copernicus, Galileo, and Descartes. In my analysis of texts that engage with the concept of a plurality of worlds, I find that the discovery of other worlds beyond the Earth--the plural worlds of the Copernican universe--challenges early modern English writers just as profoundly as the discovery of America. The expansion from a one-world universe to a plural-worlds universe, and the corresponding prospect of sharing this space, provokes a crisis of self as it disrupts one's relationships with the Other and with God. Initially, writers draw on Copernican imagery to depict the transgressive, but this association dissipates with Galileo's observational support for Copernican theory. As Galileo's discoveries increase the possibility of other worlds in our universe, writers react by reproducing conventional ideology, Earthly colonial tropes, rather than celebrating the alternative worldview. By the late seventeenth century, the new cosmic metaphor both undermines and supports conventional ideology. Restoration drama depicts a conservative vision of the Galilean universe, whereas the prose, influenced by Descartes' plurality of solar systems, celebrates the most transgressive elements of the new universe--those which counter the imperialist impulses of late seventeenth-century natural philosophy. The crisis of self generated by the new universe is finally resolved in these late seventeenth-century prose texts. Rather than participate in the dominant goal of natural philosophy--the conquest of both people and nature, in an attempt to assert European superiority--this small group of writers re-imagines humanity's metaphorical place in the universe. While scholars have often discussed how the Copernican "revolution" transformed the literary imagination, my dissertation argues that the integration of new cosmic ideas was not a linear process, but contingent upon genre, religion, and politics. By examining the cosmic metaphor from the Elizabethan era to the late seventeenth century, as well as the emergence of a new speculative mode of writing, I reveal the highly ambiguous and unstable meaning of the new metaphor and re-evaluate the imaginative construction of space, the site where multiple ideologies converge.
...MoreDescription Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 74/07(E), Jan 2014. Proquest Document ID: 1323745739.
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