“Quartering the Wind” explores the unorthodox, unstable, and seditious political values that undermined early modern English arguments for what is “natural” in human governance. I examine texts that expose a politically intricate natural world that serves no single model of orthodox politics. While ecocritical treatments of political analogies drawn from early modern nature often focus on Elizabethan visions of political and natural unity, this dissertation documents a post-Elizabethan history of political fracture, read with and through the natural world’s volatility. An array of seventeenth-century ruptures in the “natural” order of things—including the Gunpowder Plot, the 1625 plague, and the English Civil War—inspired alternative visions of “nature.” These visions seemed to justify not the “natural” monarchy of conventional Elizabethan analogy but, rather, subversive political categories such as treason, tyranny, and rebellion. By tracing the history of the corrosion of old analogies, I demonstrate how an unruly nature resists convenient human political ascriptions and how no coherent vision of human authority—whether over animals, natural resources, or other humans—is “natural.”

Last modified

• 01/29/2019

Creator

• Seth Logan Swanner

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2HN2G

Subject

• English

Keyword

• Politics
• Ecocriticism
• Analogy
• Early Modern Literature

Date created

• 2017-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright