From the temple to the castle: An architectural history of eighteenth-century British literature

Informed by and responding to recent architectural developments, including the prominent reconsideration of the relationship between literature and architecture, this dissertation focuses on a series of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British authors who had an informing interest in architecture: John Milton, Sir John Vanbrugh, Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, and Horace Walpole. Each chapter establishes the extent and terms of each author's architectural context, and then reads one literary work by each author (Paradise Lost, The Provok'd Wife, Essay on Man, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," and The Castle of Otranto) in those historical, architectural terms.;The readings cumulatively suggest how the dynamic of change in cultural forms responds to historical, political pressures. Milton, for example, draws upon mathematical models of architectural form (in Paradise Lost) to make a universalizing claim for the potential structure of a post-Civil War England, symbolized in the revised edition by the diapason intervals of the narrator's invocations; Walpole, a century later, draws on an associative architectural vocabulary (in The Castle of Otranto) to suggest both the limits of Enlightenment rationalism and the weight of history, symbolized in the novel by collapsing old buildings.;Underlying the dissertation's narrative of cultural change is both the centrality of architecture in eighteenth-century Britain (In the 1740s, Andre Rouquet wrote that "in England more than in any other country, every man would fain be his own architect") and the mutating definitions of a national architecture over the period. For Milton, Vanbrugh, and Pope, albeit in different ways, numerical principles offered a stable alternative to the political world in which they lived, whereas for Gray and Walpole, the fragmentary remnants of pre-Classical British architecture offered a vision of permanent instability, of a perhaps uniquely British kind.;Implicitly, the understanding of both nature and nation change over the period, with the natural becoming more "native." Because similar changes have been noted in the shift from Modernism to Postmodernism, the example of Britain between 1660 and 1760 suggests that what is today called "Postmodernism," is not so much the "logic of late capital" but rather the logic of early national formation.