Constructing genealogies in early modern England and the Mediterranean
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- My dissertation uncovers how and why authors in early modern English and Mediterranean literature construct explanations of their own or their societies' origins. The framework for my analysis is the notion of "genealogies"--a term that may signify bloodlines, imperial lineages, religious genealogies, imagined genealogies of heroic conquerors, or literary genealogies of authors. I further argue that competing Muslim and Christian claims to the same genealogies complicate (or even render unsustainable) many of the assumed distinctions between "East" and "West" that have endured from the Renaissance to the present day. Chapter one discusses how both Leo Africanus and his _Descrizione dell'Africa_ both reify Muslim and Christian geographical distinctions while simultaneously challenging them. I conclude the chapter with a discussion of the afterlife of Africanus' work through a European "isnad" in Luis del Mármol Carvajal's _Descripción general de Africa_. Mármol unwittingly adapts Africanus' hybrid literary genealogy in a hostile manner unintended by Africanus and, in effect, writes Africanus out of his own history. Chapter two deals with ideologies of empire, comparing consanguineal and heroic genealogies in Ludovico Ariosto's _Orlando furioso_ and Edmund Spenser's _Faerie Queene_. I address why Ariosto makes Ruggiero (the "ancestor" of Ariosto's patrons) Muslim and how Spenser manipulates genealogies to provide a solution for the aging, heirless Queen Elizabeth by collapsing time and place within his poem. Chapter three notes two competing genealogies of English kingship in Shakespeare's Henriad--Christian divine right and heroic Greco-Roman genealogies. Fluellen's comparison of Henry V with Alexander "the Pig, " even as it relies upon Plutarch's paralleled lives of Alexander and Julius Caesar, demonstrates that if Shakespeare's handling of Henry V's "Turkishness" is subversive, it is because it is emulative, not slanderous. Finally, to make a larger point about mixed blood and religion in seventeenth-century Spain, I take Cervantes' suggestion literally, that his readers imagine Sidi Hamete Benengeli as the "true author" of _Don Quijote_ and explore how, similar to Mármol's appropriation of Leo Africanus' open-ended genealogy, Avellaneda, the author of an apocryphal sequel, engages in unauthorized continuation Sidi Hamete's "verdadera historia.".
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2010 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Guglielmo, Anne Marie |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Comparative Literature. |
| Primary advisor | Greene, Roland, 1957- |
| Thesis advisor | Greene, Roland, 1957- |
| Thesis advisor | Barletta, Vincent |
| Thesis advisor | Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich |
| Thesis advisor | Parker, Patricia |
| Advisor | Barletta, Vincent |
| Advisor | Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich |
| Advisor | Parker, Patricia |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Anne Marie Guglielmo. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Comparative Literature. |
| Thesis | Ph. D. Stanford University 2010 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2010 by Anne Marie Guglielmo
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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