Consuming difference: Race, romance and religion in early modern England

This dissertation examines the relationship between religious, national, ethnic and racial identity in early modern romance, considering its imaginative work in cases where religious difference coincides with national self-definition (as religion did in both Elizabethan England and Phillip II's Spain). Romances often seek to incorporate difference, but not all differences could be assimilated, an ideological dilemma that created an emerging distinction between what I term "difference," figured in the desirable other who is incorporated to help define the self, and "alterity," figured in the unalterable other, against whom the self is defined.; In its fondness for converting Saracen knights, as exemplified in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, romance provides two models for altering racial and religious identities. Ruggiero's conversion and marriage to Bradamante typifies the "romance of transformation," where Christian conversion erases former identity, while Clarinda's conversion typifies the "romance of restoration," where a prior, originary identity is restored.; In its ability to transform and to restore, romance played a significant role in defining religious identities and in articulating emerging concepts of racial identity through identifying similarities and producing "alterities" between the English, Muslims and Catholics. Chapter one, on The Discoverie of Guiana, traces Ralegh's use of romance to produce similarities between the English and the Guyanese and to produce Spanish and Catholic alterity. Chapter two, on Book II of The Faerie Queene, investigates Spenser's rejection of the romance of restoration, necessitated by the fact that both baptismal and Ovidian transformation cannot erase all traces of former identity. Chapter three examines the mutability of identity itself in romance, as Ralegh's The Life of Muhamet, a translation of a Spanish history full of conversion and miscegenation, problematizes the stability of racial and religious categories. Chapter four argues that Othello enacts a conflict between the romance of transformation, into which Othello writes himself, and the romance of restoration, into which Iago writes Othello. Chapter five argues that Fair Maid of the West attempts to resolve early modern anxieties about miscegenation by transforming blackness, which usually signifies alterity, into a sign of difference that helps define the constancy of the self.