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The Uses of Paratextuality and Dialogicity in Early Modern English Utopias

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The Uses of Paratextuality and Dialogicity in Early Modern English Utopias Szegedi Tudományegyetem Bölcsészettudományi Kar Irodalomtudományi Doktori Iskola PhD Értekezés Maczelka Csaba The Uses of Paratextuality and Dialogicity in Early Modern English Utopias Szeged, 2013. Szegedi Tudományegyetem Bölcsészettudományi Kar Irodalomtudományi Doktori Iskola PhD Értekezés Maczelka Csaba The Uses of Paratextuality and Dialogicity in Early Modern English Utopias Témavezető: Dr. Szőnyi György Endre Szeged, 2013. Table of Contents 1. Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 1 1.1. Goal, corpus, compromises ............................................................................................ 1 1.2. The duality of approaches and its origins ....................................................................... 5 1.3. Tradition, genre, literature? ............................................................................................ 8 1.4. Pro-literary opinions ..................................................................................................... 12 1.5. Dialogue form and paratextuality ................................................................................. 15 2. The dialogic roots of utopia: Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) ............................................. 21 2.1. Textual Introduction ..................................................................................................... 24 2.2. The utopian model of More .......................................................................................... 29 The dialogic nature of Utopia ........................................................................................... 30 Fictional protocols in Utopia and its paratexts .................................................................. 45 2.3. The life of the paratexts in early editions and translations ........................................... 65 2.4. Summary....................................................................................................................... 75 3. Dialogue and utopia in the 1570s-1580s: A Pleasant Dialogue Between a Lady Called Listra and a Pilgrim (1579) ..................................................................................................... 76 3.1. The “displaced land” tradition ...................................................................................... 76 3.2. Tudor dialogues: a problem in literary history ............................................................. 81 3.3. A Pleasant Dialogue ..................................................................................................... 91 Authorship and Textual Introduction ................................................................................ 91 Paratexts and the use of the dialogue form ....................................................................... 95 3.4. Summary: a possible approach to A Pleasant Dialogue ............................................ 104 4. Converging traditions. J. Hall’s Mundus alter et idem (1605) and J. Haley’s Discovery of a New World (1609) .................................................................................................................. 109 4.1. Mundus and Discovery – Textual and Critical Introduction ...................................... 112 4.2. Dialogicity and Paratextuality in Mundus .................................................................. 117 4.3. Moral issues in Mundus and the Elizabethan dialogues ............................................. 129 4.4. Summary..................................................................................................................... 139 5. Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 142 5.1. Results ........................................................................................................................ 142 5.2. Later texts ................................................................................................................... 146 New Atlantis .................................................................................................................... 146 Macaria ............................................................................................................................ 149 The Blazing World .......................................................................................................... 150 5.3. Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 153 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................ 155 Appendices ............................................................................................................................. 169 Appendix 1. Paratext nr. 3 in More’s Utopia (Anemolius’ hexastichon) ....................... 169 Appendix 2. The Butcher and the Poticary. An excerpt from A Pleasant Dialogue (1579) ........................................................................................................................................ 170 Appendix 3. Excerpt from John Milton’s An apology against a pamphlet called A modest confutation of the animadversions upon the remonstrant against Smectymnuus (1642)171 1. Introduction 1.1. Goal, corpus, compromises The present dissertation sets out to explore how a number of English utopian texts written in the 16th and the early 17th century make use of two significant formal constituents, namely the dialogic form and the paratextual elements. These two frequently recurring aspects are, in my view, always interrelated in the texts under scrutiny, and both play a pivotal role in the way the texts negotiate their own fictitious character. This basic idea reflects long-standing dilemmas of and some recent trends in utopian scholarship, but before reflecting on these, the corpus should be designated. Although there are huge ups and down in its popularity, utopian literature is an ubiquitous phenomenon in English literature at least from 1516, the year of the publication of Thomas More’s eponymous work. The indispensable annotated bibliography compiled by one of the greatest experts on Anglo-American utopia, Lyman Tower Sargent runs to some three hundred pages, describing more than fifty works only before 1700 (Sargent 1988, 1-16). This means that in the wake of More’s work such a body of utopian literature has aggregated that someone writing about utopias inevitably has to face constant compromises and exclusions, or exercise very special selection criteria. Some writers of book-length studies on utopian literature decide to take a broad chronological view, and study only the “grand utopian writers” (More, Bacon, Bellamy, Morris, Wells, Huxley, and Orwell) – or only a handful of them. Others opt for a narrower time span so that they can pay at least some attention to 1 more “obscure” texts as well.1 However, since popular authors are more often discussed and in more details, this necessarily leads to constant over-representation of the big names and enduring under-representation in the case of lesser-known authors, causing huge disproportions in scholarship.2 Sargent refers to this problem in the Introduction to the first edition of his mentioned bibliography as one of the key problems haunting the study of utopias.3 In what follows, I opted for a shorter time-span (1516-1609), and tried to cover at least some of the less discussed utopias as well. The first compromise was made. This time span obviously covers the founder (or rediscoverer/reinventor) of the genre, Thomas More, and his fundamental work, Utopia (1516), together with Francis Bacon, author of the other pivotal early modern utopia written in England, New Atlantis (c. 1624). Both works are heavily discussed in scholarship, and any of the two could overstress the structure of my dissertation due to the sheer size of related scholarship available. Here again, then, I was forced to make painful compromises. More’s text, 1 The dilemma is obvious and often reflected in secondary works. See for example the preface to Krishan Kumar’s book (Kumar 1987), where he talks about the duality in utopian literature: grand narratives versus works on single utopias. Kumar eventually goes for 19th-20th century utopias, but feels the need to run through the whole of the tradition. Pintér reiterates the same, but for methodological reasons (develops a way of reading utopian texts and tests it on specimens of vastly different nature), his book obviously goes for the more comprehensive approach (Pintér 2010, 11). Probably the best example for a more narrowly focused treatment is Davis’s book, which is to be referred to later (Davis 1981). 2 And the discussion of the minor texts often tends to fall down to a mere retelling of the story of the texts. An example to such a treatment is Fausett’s book (Writing the New World. Imaginary Voyages and Utopias of the Great Southern Lands), which, after an intriguing introduction with many original ideas, seems to get weary at the proper discussion of the texts (Fausett 1993, for example pp. 45-48). 3 I know this only from Pintér’s book, who quotes the first edition of Sargent’s bibliography: “most scholars have not been familiar with the »vast bulk of the literature,« only the »mainstream« of the genre.” (Pintér 2010, 11). For me, only the second edition was available, where this
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