| This dissertation challenges the new historicist version of the early modern subject by arguing that the early modern self consisted of both an ahistorical interior constructed of emotions and desires, and the coded behaviors of the culture in which it was embedded. Texts by Spenser, Daniel, Ford, Donne, and Jonson construct selves via language that mediates between the internal and the external. The process of early modern self-construction is therefore dialectical in ways for which neither psychoanalytic nor materialist approaches can sufficiently account. Drawing upon the work of Anthony Giddens, I demonstrate that each of the authors whose work I examine use language to create a subject that can, in Giddens terms, both "organize the social activities" in which it participates and simultaneously be altered by those activities. Giddens' work permits me to problematize New Historicism's notions of textual production, authorship and subject-formation, particularly the circular model of "social energy" that Stephen Greenblatt espouses. By examining how early modern authors used tropes of the mirror, the portrait and the heart, I establish that the dialectical models of visual reception in the period influenced the models of self-construction employed by those authors. By combining Gidden's theories and early modern reception theory, I construct a model of early modern subjectivity that transcends the internal/external binary and permits a more complex reading of the process of early modern self-construction. |
