Ideology, travell, and social change in early modern English culture

Early modern English literature was enmeshed in the ideological struggles generated by fundamental changes to the country's social structure. It did so from a range of ideological positions and by recourse to an array of formal resources. In this dissertation I investigate mutually determining engagements between literature and social change and between ideology and form in order to illuminate the processes through which capitalist social relations emerged out of premodern structures of feeling and meaning while other possibilities were foreclosed.;In order to provide a sense of the scope and texture of these interactions, I offer historically and theoretically informed close readings of work by three authors from the large and heterogeneous middle of the English social hierarchy---Thomas Deloney, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare---writing in three different genres---prose fiction, narrative poetry, and dramatic romance, respectively. My readings draw attention to the different means through which literature engages in ideological struggle. At the same time, I use literary and other texts to reconstruct the discursive fields within which literature was consumed and ideology was contested.;Considered together, my three authors communicate a sense of the heterogeneity of positions among men of the middling sort---the group that was to be the primary beneficiary of the social changes of the era. Deloney, a silk weaver, identifies with the interests and values of a community of artisans, whom his work exists, in part, to aid. By contrast, Spenser---given the depth of his learning, the poetic traditions in which he identified himself, and his state service in Ireland---tends to identify with those above him in the social hierarchy. On the evidence of Pericles, Shakespeare's allegiances are much harder to fix than are Deloney's or Spenser's; I argue that Shakespeare's play exemplifies his society's ambivalent and contradictory responses to social transformation.;More generally, my project makes the straightforward point that the imaginative writing of early modern England engaged in struggles over new forms of labor and issues of change to a greater extent than is usually acknowledged. Beyond this, I want this study to make the case that literature is an indispensable means through which to bring to light the specificities of ideological struggle in this moment of emergence of our present-day economic system.