| This project examines the development of utopian imagination in Tudor and Stuart England, charting a populist vehicle for reconceiving social order in the apparently unlikely location of literature featuring rogues and vagabonds. Although Thomas More's paradigmatic Utopia is not soon imitated in England, subsequent popular literature reveals a similar utopian function that critiques the given world and prompts a shared preconsciousness of alternative social order. Significant work has already been done on the cultural function of rogue pamphlets to occlude the suffering of the homeless and underemployed and thus to justify governmental disciplinary measures against them. The major contribution of this project is to recover a utopian function of rogue pamphlets and drama through characters that work across hierarchical boundaries to generate a shared recognition of economic and social jeopardy. Instead of conceptualizing utopia as a genre or static model for the ideal commonwealth, I argue for a utopian dimension within popular texts that connects high and low cultures and works across genres. Drawing on theories of utopia of Paul Ricoeur and Ernst Bloch, among others, this study brings together lesser-known pamphlets of Harman, Greene, and Dekker with plays by Middleton, Dekker, Webster, Fletcher, and Shakespeare, demonstrating the emergence of a rogue utopianism that later becomes more explicit in novels and drama of the eighteenth century. In so doing, this dissertation reconstructs a hidden literary history of critical social imagination located in the alternative worlds suggested by underground characters. |
