| In this project, I aim to combine and recast the often distinct studies of literary criticism, material culture and nationalism to uncover the crucial role that the cloth industry played in forming national identity in the early modern period. I look primarily at texts on the margins of the literary canon and in so doing broaden the scope of recent work on literature and English nation formation which has examined how major authors of the period have contributed to an emerging nationalism. My dissertation focuses on writing as various as the prose of Thomas Deloney, Thomas Dekker, and Robert Greene, the travel writing of Richard Hakluyt, the drama of Thomas Middleton, the civic pageants of Anthony Munday, and the poetry of Ben Jonson. While in these texts cloth is seen as a pivotal cultural object, it is never simply represented as a commodity for trade and consumption; rather, cloth emerges as an affective object with power to organize fantasies of national solidarity. Literature, in turn, serves as an important means by which this sentiment is expressed. While the texts and issues on which my dissertation focuses are wide-ranging (linking prose narrative with cloth production, drama with corrupt mercantilism, travel narrative with cloth exports, satire with foreign imports), they all help us to understand the interwoven relationship between literature and the cloth industry in early modern England. Texts and textiles, as I argue, are intimately linked. |
