"The World in Man's Heart": The Faculty of Imagination in Early Modem English Literature

Abstract

<P> No evaluation of the Renaissance-its culture and texts-is complete without understanding early modem imagination. Yet many modem critics have understated or misunderstood the imagination's importance to the English Renaissance. Misconceptions arise, in part, because our current understanding of imagination has been influenced by Romantic theorists, whose definitions of imagination differ radically from early modem beliefs about the functions and capabilities of the faculty. A comprehensive study of early modem imagination is therefore essential. This thesis undertakes the timely task of analyzing the significance of Renaissance definitions and characteristics of imagination as they are posited in early modem philosophical and medical texts. To early modem English theorists such as Francis Bacon, Robert Burton, and Margaret Cavendish, the physical location of imagination determines its function and significance, its potentially dangerous autonomy is a constant threat, the imagination can disastrously or advantageously influence the body, and it can justify textual novelty and creativity. Studying imagination is incomplete without understanding its expansion in literary texts, for in poetry, drama, and fictional narratives, authors self-consciously employ and debate the characteristics of imagination philosophers, physicians, and theologians were earnestly debating. In The Temple, George Herbert crafts his poetry and his text to metaphorically display and debate the physical position of imagination in the brain. Richard Brome's play, The Antipodes, questions the autonomy of imagination. Can the imagination be controlled, Brome asks, and by what? The Unfortunate Traveller, Thomas Nashe's prose narrative, fleshes out early modem considerations of the imagination's impact on the body of the imaginant and others. Francis Quarles's Emblemes illustrates-literallyRenaissance debates about imagination's influence on originality and creativity. For, in their literary texts, early modem authors use their contemporaries' theories of imagination to justify and test their relationship with, and responsibility to, God, their readers, and themselves. </p>