Abstract

This dissertation examines elegies that depart from conventional ahistorical motives of the genre. Landmark studies investigate the elegy's psychoanalytic dimensions, but do not address the genre's relationship to historical discourse. Unlike most seventeenth-century English elegies, which involve a rhetorical progression from lamentation to praise to consolation grounded in Christian tenets of the soul's immortality and transcendence of historical contingencies, the elegies discussed in my dissertation situate spiritual consolation in temporal causes, cultural contexts, and historiographic practices. I argue that these transformations in poetic genre complement a paradigm shift from theocentric to secular representations of human history, thereby revealing a nascent, early modern historical imagination, or what I call figural historicity. Many twentieth-century literary critics and historians confirm this historiographic paradigm shift; however, the seventeenth-century English elegy has not yet been investigated as a form of historical discourse. My dissertation extends related works in poetic theory, genre theory, cultural criticism and historiography to a new cultural approach to literary genres, or what I wish to define as new genre theory. Within this interdisciplinary field of comparative genre and cultural analysis, the seventeenth-century English elegy's contribution to historical discourse has yet to be assessed. This dissertation addresses that gap in early modern literary and historical research. ;The project includes chapters on canonical poets and one non-canonical poet , and participates in current revisions of Renaissance and seventeenth-century English literature by analyzing relationships between literary genres, religion, historiography, and politics in early modern culture. My interdisciplinary approach incorporates early and late twentieth-century scholarship with theoretical and historical methodologies. Each chapter situates one elegy in relation to other elegies by the same poet and to a particular historical discourse. This comparative method establishes the place of each poem and of the genre in the writing of early modern English history. My work supplements the political focus of new historicism with new attention to relationships between literary history, literary genres, and historiography in early modern culture