The Poetics of Pestilence: Plague-Time and the Writing Culture in Early Modern England

This dissertation addresses the relationship of writing and plague in seventeenth-century England in the works of four authors: the "plague pamphlets" of Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson's play The Alchemist, William Shakespeare's plays Measure for Measure, and Timon of Athens, and John Donne's Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. Through their respective genres, they bestow upon their readers the means to better understand, defend, and inoculate themselves against the effects of disease by forging a connection between the fit reader of the physical body and the body politic. Despite their separate approaches, all of these texts offer primers for a hermeneutics of diseased flesh, ravaged metaphorically and literally by the plague, while simultaneously suggesting the possibility for cultural/social redemption through pathological crisis.;Modern tropes of disease, from biological warfare to viral media, maintain their roots in a profoundly historical relationship between models of contagion and technological revolution. It thus behooves us to revisit early modern literature of the plague in order to better understand the course of our own encounters with disease, and by extension, the transformations they will possibly produce in a digital era that mirrors the epistemological explosion of the Renaissance. The goal of these chapters is to argue for a reconsideration of the plague as a culturally catalyzing force, specifically within the realm of literature, by taking more seriously the impact of the pestilence on the related projects of nation-building, print technology, and authorship in early modern England.