Mixed Genre and the Politics of Early Modern Romance

This dissertation argues that early modern romance writers such as Ariosto, Sidney, Spenser, and Wroth employed a sophisticated strategy of generic mixing when dealing with potentially troubling political topics. These elite writers associated with the court found the genre's formal flexibility particularly useful for articulating sophisticated and even contradictory ideas at moments of intense conflict and indecision in relation to the monarch, to court culture, or public opinion. This study challenges the notion, predominant among investigations of early modern genre theory, that romance was primarily a foil for more serious epic concerns of empire, proto-nationalism, and victorious Protestant piety. Rather, that opposition was only one of many ways that these writers would set romance in relation to other narrative and poetic genres in order to investigate competing political viewpoints, navigate personal and professional conflicts of interest, and ultimately question their literary culture's reliance on using genre as a political and rhetorical tool. For these writers the politics of genre came to embody a means of articulating relationships to a host of different pressures (governmental, social, professional, and erotic) that did not easily cohere, especially since romance itself was already a genre on the margins of literary culture.

The particular authors I discuss show a growing attention to the relationship between political content and political form in romance. Philip Sidney's revision of the Arcadia show him exploring contradictions in his understanding of political agency, which pits a self-assertive pastoral romance against chivalric romance concerned with expressions of duty to social and political masters. In Books V and VI of The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser investigates how literary genres can be used for political purposes, culminating in a sense of Courtesy marked by the ability to manipulate genres for political ends. Finally, Mary Wroth's The Countess of Montgomery's Urania looks at the mastery of political genre in fiction, using generic mixture to articulate a rhetorical control and literary autonomy over the rhetoric of political genre to compensate for her lack of political agency in her life. In each case, romance allows for a mixture of genre based on conflict rather than synthesis to become a productive form of political commentary.