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Abstract
This dissertation argues that in the transition from medieval to early modern literature there is a consistent, productive tension between the centripetal pull of corporate identities and the centrifugal impulses of personal experience. Nuanced uses of this tension by early English authors reveal a shift toward individualism from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. This tension can be discerned within a series of poetic and dramatic texts, which offer specific interventions in the development of the individual self during the English Renaissance. The tension between individualism and corporatism functioned as a shared literary paradigm with which English authors constructed increasingly complex narratives and characters. I show how the competing modes of individualism and corporatism frame the romances of Chaucer and Malory (Chapters One and Two), organize the epics of Spenser and Milton (Chapter's Three and Six), and characterize the historical dramas of Marlowe and Shakespeare (Chapters Four and Five). By demonstrating that there was a growing attention paid to individualism in the literature of the English Renaissance, I participate in the recent scholarly turn to Burckhardtian criticism among early modernist scholars. Additionally, by demonstrating that individualism was germinal, but definitely present, in the English Middle Ages, I build on the important contributions of medievalists who have investigated the formations of individual identity and subjectivity in the art and literature of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. I thus track the influence of medieval texts on early modern authors—and their fascination with the individual's relationship to the corporate structures of society—with the aim of initiating a richer critical discourse on the history of the individual in English literature.
