Petrarch's wound: Love, violence and the writing of the Renaissance nation

Petrarch's Wound examines Petrarchan violence in 16th-century English and French poetry, focusing on the work of Maurice Sceve, Joachim du Bellay and Edmund Spenser. Petrarch's Canzoniere influenced the lyric output of Europe for three hundred years beyond the poet's death. It dramatized, in the Italian vernacular, the birth of lyric subjectivity through the crises of love---a pattern that subsequent European poets imitated as a poetic rite of passage. For Renaissance poets however, Petrarch was not only a model to emulate, but one to outdo.;This dissertation focuses on Petrarchan imitation in the 16th century, and in particular on the use of Petrarchan tropes in the formation of early modern national identity and political critique in France and England. The freight of violence and fragmentation in Renaissance lyric reflects the struggle to forge a national literary canon in a disadvantaged vernacular, in the face of classical greatness and the literary achievement of Petrarch himself. In striving to do for England and France what Homer and Virgil had done for Greece and Rome---and most especially what Petrarch had done more recently for the Tuscan vernacular and the literary prestige of Italy---the 16th-century poet fashioned a self that simultaneously defined a nation.;One of Petrarch's main source texts, Ovid's Metamorphoses shaped the metaphors of violated bodies that appeared in later Renaissance Petrarchan sequences. The following chapters each use an Ovidian figure as a lens through which to investigate images of violence and fragmentation that body forth nationalist and political undercurrents:;Chapter One focuses on the myth of Actaeon in Petrarch's Rime sparse and the Delie of Maurice Sceve, exploring Sceve's returns to the Ovidian original to recreate the Canzoniere in a specifically Lyonnais setting. Chapter Two uses the myth of Echo to explore the anxiety of vernacular underdevelopment and "cannibalistic" imitation in Joachim du Bellay's manifesto, the Defense and Illustration of the French Language and in his Petrarchan sonnet sequence, L'Olive. Chapter Three draws on Ovid's myth of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis in tracing the critique of political Petrarchism and Elizabethan absolutism in Spenser's Faerie Queene and Amoretti.