The critical baroque in English literature, 1650--1750

This dissertation identifies a tradition of experimentation in English literature that ceases to view literary rhetoric as purely instrumental, as a way of arriving at a specific goal. I take the indeterminacy of "baroque" artistic strategies (the architectural approximation of motion, the painterly flickers between light and darkness, the disorientation of perspective, the relentless draping of its figures) and locate them in literary practice, where they manifest themselves generally as cognitive effects determined by rhetorical manipulation. Especially susceptible in this process is a work's most linear-tending device, its progression toward a discernable telos, which in the baroque is governed principally by obliquity and indirection. The authors I study achieve their oblique effects by reconceiving the traditional stages of composition and allowing a reworked second stage of composition, dispositio, to mingle with and be governed by the first stage, inventio. The baroque artist will not necessarily anticipate the unified plot or argument; instead, the audience conjures a unity from the incidental joining of parts---ultimately a critical act written into the literary work. Picking up this line of thinking from John Milton and Andrew Marvell, who share the rhetorical implications of "contiguity," I trace it through the oblique progress of Marvell's Appleton House, John Dryden's so-called "digressive" critical prefaces, Sir John Vanbrugh's "undigested" organization of his dramatic and architectural works, and, finally, the "No-Plan" of folding and implication followed by Samuel Richardson in Clarissa. When writing in this way coincides with the planning, the texts produced subvert the autonomy of any linear unifying perspective from within, and take on an eccentric relation to any orienting sense of argument or plot, which I term "cryptoteleological." Like the idea of the baroque itself, an individual baroque work exists as a critical, though incompletely actual, ideal.;The concept of the baroque not only allows me to identify this strand of art-inspired literary writing, but also forms an analogy through which many critics view their own conceptual work. The twentieth-century shift from an artistic to a critical interest is, I argue, a transformation backwards, from making baroque things to making things baroque.