Rebellious hearts and loyal passions: Imagining civic consciousness in Ovidian writing on women, 1680--1819

While scholars have long recognized that Ovid's writing on love and transformation played a vital role in medieval and early modern literary history, most studies of English Ovidianism conclude some time before the execution of Charles I in 1649. My dissertation argues that during and after the Restoration Ovid's writing about women became the source of a new literary language for discussing the role of the passions in political affiliation and action. By speaking through Ovid's heroines and other female characters modeled on their design, poets and novelists across the long eighteenth century rendered topics of partisan disagreement, from Jacobitism to Jacobinism, into emotionally engaging psychodramas, case studies in how emotionality could affect the taking of vows and the forging of social and sexual contracts. Beginning with Ovidian responses to the exclusion crisis of 1678--81, my project extends the study of Ovidianism into the era of print culture and party politics, documenting how vernacular forms of classicism contributed to uniquely modern literary modes like Whig history-writing, journalism, Romantic poetry, and evangelical and abolitionist fiction. The project surveys a diverse range of authors from the Restoration to the Regency---John Dryden, Aphra Behn, Jane Barker, John Oldmixon, Joseph Addison, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Alexander Pope, Samuel Richardson, Phillis Wheatley, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron---who used heroines of Ovidian pedigree to explore the relationship between social or ethical responsibilities and individual appetite or affection. Ovidianism even played a decisive role, I argue, in the development of the English novel, particularly to its characteristically fraught analogies between amatory experience and affairs of state. By recovering this widely influential but now largely forgotten tradition of political Ovidianism, my project contributes to on-going critical conversations about the influence of partisan politics on the rise of the novel, the intellectual origins of early feminism, and the relationship between affect and political affiliation.