| Vulgar Readings is broadly concerned with questions about literary knowledge: what can one know about literature? And what other kinds of knowledge (about, for example, history, politics, science, psychology, sexuality) can be encoded in literature? The dissertation is more particularly concerned with identifying kinds of knowledge that become available as the literature of the English high Renaissance is anthologized and processed in the course of the seventeenth century and in later critical traditions. My point of entry into these investigations is a humanist trope: the prefaces and paratextual materials to many Renaissance poetry collections imagine a sort of anti-reader, sometimes called "the vulgar reader," who will fail to recognize the classical subtexts that authorize the English text. The "vulgar reader" trope is both defensive, in that it seeks to protect English poems from practices of literal reading deemed vulgar, and generative, in that it imagines both an idealized humanist reading practice as well as a despised vernacular reading practice naively confident that poetry must encode something other than its own history. The dissertation provides a history of reading practices in which the "vulgar reader" figure is central; I also adopt this figure as an emblem for my practice of reading poems through their externalization in criticism.;The dissertation is divided into three groups of paired essays. The first group is concerned with poetry anthologies from the later seventeenth century. Here, I'm primarily construing literary knowledge as knowledge about the attribution of texts to writers. The second group presents two episodes in the cultural history of blank verse: one from the reception of Marlowe's poetry in English studies, and the other from the prefatory material to Paradise Lost . In this group, I'm construing literary knowledge as practical knowledge of how poetry is made. The third group uses the diaries of Anne Clifford and Samuel Pepys partly as evidence for the reading habits of Clifford and Pepys, and partly to investigate the practices of evidence-gathering in English studies. Here, I'm construing literary knowledge as the history of reading practices, and particularly as the historical information that critics look for in diaries. |
