Towards an Aesthetic of Retreat: Neo-Stoicism, Recusant Culture and Gardens in Seventeenth-Century Scotland
Date
2012-10-16
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
ORCID
Type
Degree Level
Masters
Abstract
During rapid social change, the value of literary culture becomes problematic. A context with much yet to reveal about the cultural impact of social change is late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Scotland. This thesis concerns the inventiveness with which a few leading cultural proponents in Scotland sought space for perspectives made marginal in the Reformation. Literary invention, celebrated as the means to articulate individuality, offered a way to ground positions that in the political arena would have been recusant. Fictive and actual gardens provide important space in which such invention can flourish. A neo-Stoic balance is achieved by the negotiation of tradition and invention, an equilibrium of old and new which is central to the pastoral and which underlies poetic – and self – composition in Jacobean Scotland.
Description
Keywords
literature, culture, change, Scotland, early modern, invention, tradition
Citation
Degree
Master of Arts (M.A.)
Department
English
Program
English