| My dissertation explores the continued vitality of local habits of thought against the "forms of nationhood" emphasized by recent historians. By examining a variety of English writers and modes of discourse, I probe the local's responsiveness to the larger political, religious, and cultural changes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Far from functioning merely as a retreat from or alternative to a burgeoning nationalism, the local emerges as a dynamic site of negotiation where broader changes get modified and adapted to the particulars of geography, circumstance, and tradition. Over the course of four chapters, I investigate the complex ways in which the relationship between local and national is configured, from William Lambarde's narrative ordering of the Perambulation of Kent as a calculated response to the Tudor centralization of shire government; to the primacy of local landscape in Michael Drayton's historical poetry, and its role in creating a heroic alternative to Jacobean court culture; to George Herbert's depiction of parish religion in the Country Parson as a local modification of a more rigid Laudian uniformity; to a shift in the representation of the English country house---exemplified in the poems of Mildmay Fane---from the center of a local social community to an exemplar of the new landscape aesthetic. Together, these case studies offer an interdisciplinary treatment of localism, underscoring its versatility as a response to political centralization, religious uniformity, court culture, and aesthetics. |
