Repainting romance: Ekphrasis and otherness in Renaissance imitations of ancient Greek romance

My dissertation, "Repainting Romance: Ekphrasis and Otherness in Renaissance Imitations of Ancient Greek Romance," illuminates complex literary articulations of flexible cultural identity through the deployment of verbal images in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century imitations of ancient Greek romance. My method opens new avenues for investigations of early modern identity through the discourse of word image studies: I examine romance characters' interactions with visual art objects in ekphrastic passages to chart adaptive shifts in gender, ethnicity, and religious affiliation. I contend that the interlaced structures and vast geographies of the romance genre produce sophisticated depictions of unstable cultural identity that merit our critical attention. Unlike assessments of self-fashioned and performative lyrical and dramatic representations of personhood that emphasize individual agency, my project puts cultural situation in dialogue with passible identity, showing that romance characters adapt to the realities into which the romancer weaves them. By analyzing early modern romances by Sidney, Cervantes, and Wroth, I demonstrate that the influence of Greek romances by Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus provided Renaissance imitators with a rich gallery of verbal images and ekphrastic techniques. I argue that in order to articulate new expressions of unstable cultural identity, Renaissance authors are not satisfied to imitate; rather, they translate Greek romance models of verbal image literacy into early modern European and colonial articulations of the intersections between word and image. My chapters explore such early modern contextualizations of ekphrasis as the European fascination with courtly expectations for emblematic reading, American pictographic language, eroticization of eastern ornament, and African hieroglyphics. Ultimately, I demonstrate that depictions of unstable identity in romance reflect anxieties about the potential for a loss of identity in a rapidly widening world and respond to these anxieties by offering the utopian possibility of the assimilation of outsiders into European communities through the wish-fulfillment that characterizes romance.