Abstract:

Poetics of Futurity investigates Renaissance literary constructions of the future, the complex relations between futurity and narrative, and the emergence of novel accounts of Englishness that turn on looking to the future rather than the past. I revise an image of poets lamenting their estrangement from the ancient world by showing that an engagement with classical culture transformed the way literary artists looked ahead, and enabled them to imagine what kind of past their present would become. In readings of William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and Cymbeline , Sir Philip Sidney's Old Arcadia , Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene and John Milton's Paradise Lost , I discover moments of looking forward in which characters consider their place in time, and illuminate the potential of the present to influence memories in the making. Textual engagements with temporality--from a simple act of promising to an ambitious attempt to establish England as a site of artistic origin--reveal that these poets anticipate the future in plays, poems and prose fictions. I argue that for these writers, the renovation of temporal boundaries suggested not a drive toward the end of days, but rather a continuous productive retrospection.

In recovering the future of the Renaissance, Poetics of Futurity moves away from traditional, end-driven accounts of aftertimes: prophecies of the apocalypse or claims to the monumentality afforded by poetic immortality. Instead, I identify a distinct version of futurity that privileges continuity, as when characters exhibit an "anticipatory nostalgia," and imagine looking back on their own present moment. My first two chapters examine plays that foreground the artistic legacy of antiquity. The repetition of classical myths in Titus Andronicus exposes a pronounced danger to the future in both imitation and end-driven interpretive practice. Amongst the violent, repetitive engagements with Ovid and ancient literature, Shakespeare's hapless, illiterate Clown offers an unlikely alternative. In Cymbeline , the challenges of re-telling replace the dangers of re-enactment: the courtly wager plot depends upon the memory of ancient art objects while the Welsh pastoral space inspires heroic action. In both spaces, characters delight in imagining the stories they eventually will be able to tell about the present. In chapters three and four, I approach forward-looking structures that reflect broader legal and historiographical issues under debate in the sixteenth century. Sidney investigates futurity through the backward-looking act of judgment, attending especially to the mechanisms by which the present moment might control and secure the future. In particular, the act of promising illuminates scenes of writing, revision and judgment in the romance. Spenser rewrites the history of an uncertain national past in episodes scattered across his poem, emphasizing not only that the future has yet to be determined, but also that future acts of writing and reading constantly rework the past. In a coda that traces a discomfort with wasted time and errancy, I argue that Milton's poem unsettles its own teleological drive. The treatment of the moments between Fall and expulsion disavows the paralysis engendered by dwelling on the past. Instead, the poem encourages movement forward, granting even an uncertain future the privilege of potential.