Poesie est un pre: Landscapes in French lyric poetry, 1549--1584

"Poesie est un pre: Landscapes in French Lyric Poetry, 1549--1584", reconsiders French Renaissance lyric and pastoral in the light of recent work on literary nationhood. The notion of the "French literary landscape" is brought back to landscape itself, asking specifically what kind of landscape lyric and pastoral poetry map out for themselves, and how these landscapes are presented in dialogue with proto-nationalist, and with regionalist, discourses in the sixteenth century. The conclusions are contrary to what one might expect: despite the proclaimed collective project of the Pleiade, which is the instauration of an era of French writing to rival the production of Italy and Greece, none of the poets considered offers a simple, tranquil vision of France or of its regions as an ideal fertile ground for lyric creation. Rather, it seems that this vision is only evoked to show its fragility. Each of the poets considered constructs landscape as a site of dynamic contention between a potential lyric vision of France, and competing discourses or claims on French poetic space. By an opening up of the referential system of poetic landscape to the polyphony of discourses surrounding the moment of its production, French Renaissance lyric is here reinterpreted as a genre that dramatises its own instability and vulnerability to other discourses---the vulnerability precisely of the Pleiade's proto-nationalist poetic project. Ultimately the mid-century poets, while fully admitting the strength of opposing discourses and the contingency of their own vision, maintain uniquely poetic equivalent of what David Harvey has called "spaces of hope." The dissertation considers collections by Ronsard, Du Bellay, Remy Belleau and Vauquelin de la Fresnaie. Detailed consideration is given to the role and transformation of Italian and Latin intertexts, in particular, Petrarch, Sannazaro, Horace and Ovid. The study is informed by a range of critical and theoretical work, from Thomas Greene on imitation to Henri Lefebvre on capitalist "space" to Neil Evernden and Simon Schama on the social and cultural construction of nature.