Renaissance ekphrasis and the objects of history

This dissertation examines Renaissance literary descriptions, or ekphrases, against the background of the early modern rise of objectivity. In late sixteenth-century England, description was increasingly becoming an instrument of historiographical objectivity. Antiquarians attempted to approach history objectively by describing ruins and other historical objects without the 'admixture' of the imagination. This dissertation looks at Renaissance literary ekphrases in order to explore the growing tensions between the aims of empirical knowledge and of imaginative literature. In exploring these historical tensions, central problems of aesthetics become evident, especially concerning the interrelationship between artistic form and the historical world. The project probes how the historical world is written into the literary artwork at the same time as the artwork maintains a unique distance from that world.;Four chapters consider the work of Petrarch, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare. Each chapter is a case study of an ekphrasis providing a history that, in different ways, is embedded in this ekphrasis. The first chapter establishes the early humanist background by looking at Petrarch's fourteenth-century description of Roman ruins in both his Rerum familiarum libri and The Africa against traditions of medieval universal history. The next chapter is a study of the House of Busirane in Spenser's 1590 The Faerie Queene in relation to recent antiquarian discoveries of ancient Roman grotesque paintings in Nero's Domus Aurea. The third chapter recovers the aestheticized imperial rhetoric of Second Sophistic Greek romances that lies behind Marlowe's Hero and Leander. A final chapter considers how the ekphrasis in Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece responds to an increasing awareness of the historical material fragment in the period.;This project argues that the ekphrastic literary object is made out of history, yet is fundamentally unlike antiquarian descriptions of ruins or of any other kind of historical object. Drawing on twentieth-century aesthetic philosophy, especially that of Theodor Adorno, the project attempts to navigate between, on one side, an overly reified, positivist understanding of artworks, and, on the other, a defunct idealism. The project explores how literature relates dynamically to history, and ultimately evokes history's repressed aspects, especially brutality and suffering.