| This dissertation explores the material and mythic influences of the New World environment and culture on European society by reversing the Eurocentric critical approach of "civilized" Europeans determining the colonies; rather than viewing how Europe determines the periphery, this project illuminates the way in which the American periphery determines the European core. By giving voice to alternative societies and their environment across the Atlantic, this interdisciplinary study, which in part considers the ethnographic origins of botanical science in Europe, shows how the works of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Jonson not only reflect the proto-capitalist consumption of New World resources, but also the literary consumption of New World myths.;In Chapter 1, I contend that Mexican amaranthus, which was integral to Mesoamerican ecology, diet, and rituals of human sacrifice, finds literary representation in Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, offering a counterintuitive notion of early modern transculturation: rather than view the New World through the eyes of Greco-Roman culture, I will view European gardens--and Spenser's Faery Land--through the cultural and botanical template of Mexica society. Chapter 2 explores the mythological origins and commercial marketing of the American plant Guaiacum. By illustrating the American wood as a source of holiness and salvation in the works of Spenser, and a marketable commodity in the works of Jonson, this chapter illuminates the assimilation of the Native American environment by the dominant Western civilization. Chapter 3 traces tobacco's journey through English literature from myth to market, from exotic curative to common commodity, from the private herbal gardens of physicians to the public tobacco shops of London streets. Chapter 4 examines Caliban's fishy half, "poor john," in Shakespeare's The Tempest, showing how "poor john," otherwise known as Newfoundland salt-dry codfish, contributed to the highest concerns of the nation-state---domestic stability, national security, and foreign trade---and how it served as a focus for debates about the changing nature of trade in the early seventeenth century. |
