Migration and Mimesis in the English Renaissance, 1492-1668

Abstract

This dissertation argues that migration constituted an essential problematic in Renaissance literature and history. Definitions of migration vary across disciplines with different levels of abstraction and sub-categorization. Rather than adopt a prescriptive notion of what migration is, which can only be provisional, this study approaches migration as a social process (or praxis) whose meaning is itself subject to ongoing interpretation, not least through literature and drama. As a social movement, migration is always already a site of interpretive conflict, a fact nowhere more evident than in how the mass movement of people, along with climate change, has come to be perceived as one of the most pressing and contested issues facing humanity today. This study traces the beginning(s) of this present-day crisis in the social and historical contradictions of early modernity (1492-1668), a pivotal moment in world history that witnessed voluntary and forced migrations on a global scale. It does so through the unique perspective afforded by literary history, conceived in the longue durée but with a particular focus on works produced in and around England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Specifically, it examines four major genres of Renaissance literature and drama (utopian fiction, tragedy, romance, and pastoral) which responded to the conditions that produced, and were produced by, migration in the early modern world.