Representing ruins in English Renaissance literature: Empire, identity and the legacy of the English Reformation, c.1530-c.1660

至少自罗马帝国灭亡以来，废墟——腐朽建筑、城市和文化的物质遗迹——一直是西欧艺术和文学中反复出现的主题。在近代早期，罗马废墟激发了法国、意大利和低地国家大量诗歌和绘画的创作。然而，英国在这一时期的废墟经历是非常独特的，与其说是罗马废墟，不如说是1530年代英国宗教改革期间被镇压的650座罗马天主教修道院的废墟。修道院的解散是英国文学中废墟表现的决定性事件，其重要性反映在奥斯汀的《诺桑觉寺》（1798- 179）和华兹华斯的《丁冬寺》（1798）等后期作品的标题中。然而，尽管废墟在哥特和浪漫主义文学中被广泛认为是一个重要的主题，但它们对我们理解英国文艺复兴时期文学的意义在很大程度上被忽视了。在斯宾塞和莎士比亚的作品中，有一些对废墟的批判性认识，但没有一本书的篇幅研究表明它们在早期现代文学中的重要性。这个项目对这个未被充分探索的话题进行了深入的评估，调查了在1530年代修道院解散后的漫长世纪里，废墟是如何以及为什么在英国文艺复兴时期的文学中表现出来的。虽然它承认法国和意大利表现罗马废墟的模式对英国文学的影响，但它也认为英国新教改革经历的独特性及其对英国文学废墟表现的影响。评论家认为，英国文艺复兴时期文学的废墟反映了这一时期的古物兴趣。但废墟不仅仅是一扇通向过去的窗户；它们也是一面反映当前未来命运的镜子，它们的脆弱提醒着文明的衰亡。法国文艺复兴诗人约阿希姆·杜·贝雷在16世纪中期读到罗马过去的废墟，这是对早期现代帝国努力的虚荣的一种评论，在这个项目中，我将这种观点的翻译追溯到新教英格兰的特定背景以及它作为近代早期帝国的自我形象。在废墟中，这个项目解读了英国文艺复兴时期写作中一股激进的暗流，它质疑和批评了它似乎支持的帝国结构。该项目将这种研究废墟的方法与当前关于都铎王朝和斯图亚特王朝时期英国国家形成机制的批判性辩论进行了对话，反驳了最近一系列批评，这些批评认为英国文艺复兴时期的文学在很大程度上支持了英格兰对不列颠和爱尔兰的帝国野心。它的发现将对我们对英国文学和英国身份的认识和理解做出重大贡献，它对废墟的关注揭示了近代早期文学中对英国帝国意识形态的抵抗。该项目将以赫尔大学为基地，那里的安德鲁马维尔中心为中世纪和早期现代时期的跨学科研究提供了一个既定的框架，并且在赫尔历史中心收藏了关于马维尔的重要档案资源。马维尔是一位诗人和政治家，与赫尔有着终生的联系，他与赫尔和约克郡中世纪修道院遗址的关系是该项目的重点。除了专著“文艺复兴时期的废墟文学：斯宾塞到马维尔”之外，该项目的研究结果将通过期刊文章、会议论文和马维尔学术会议，以及与赫尔历史中心合作并与马维尔专家奈杰尔·史密斯教授（普林斯顿）合作的学校会议、公开讲座和公共展览“马维尔和中世纪赫尔”来传播。

Ruins - the material remains of decayed buildings, cities, and cultures - have been a recurrent theme in the art and literature of Western Europe since at least the fall of the Roman Empire, and in the early modern period Roman ruins inspired an outpouring of poems and paintings across France, Italy, and the Low Countries. Britain's experience of ruins in this period was highly distinctive, however, defined less by Roman ruins than by the Roman Catholic ruins of the 650 abbeys suppressed during the English Reformation in the 1530s. The Dissolution of the Monasteries was the defining event for representations of ruins in English literature, its significance reflected in the titles of later works like Austen's 'Northanger Abbey' (1798-9) and Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey' (1798). Yet while ruins are widely acknowledged as an important motif in Gothic and Romantic literatures, their significance for our understanding of English Renaissance literature has been largely overlooked. There has been some critical recognition of ruins in writing by Spenser and Shakespeare, but no book-length study charting their significance in literature across the early modern period. This project offers an in-depth assessment of this underexplored topic, investigating how and why ruins were represented in English Renaissance literature within the long century following the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s. While it acknowledges the influence on English literature of French and Italian models for representing Roman ruins, it also argues for the distinctiveness of England's experience of the protestant Reformation and its impact on English literary representations of ruins. Critics have argued that ruins in English Renaissance literature reflect the antiquarian interests of this period. But ruins were more than a window onto the past; they were also a mirror reflecting the future fate of the present, their fragility a reminder of the decline and fall of civilisations. It is as a comment on the vanity of early modern imperial endeavour that the French Renaissance poet Joachim Du Bellay read the ruins of Rome's past in the mid-sixteenth century, and in this project I trace the translation of this perspective to the particular context of protestant England and its own self-image as an empire in the early modern period. In ruins, the project reads a radical undercurrent in English Renaissance writing that questions and critiques the constructs of empire it appears to support. The project brings this approach to ruins into dialogue with current critical debates about the mechanics of British state-formation under the Tudors and Stuarts, arguing against a stream of recent criticism that sees English Renaissance literature as largely supportive of England's imperial ambitions over Britain and Ireland. Its findings will make a significant contribution to our knowledge and understanding of both English literature and English identity, its focus on ruins revealing sites of resistance in literature to England's imperial ideology in the early modern period. The project will be based at the University of Hull, where the Andrew Marvell Centre offers an established framework for interdisciplinary research in the medieval and early modern periods, and where significant archival resources on Marvell are housed at the Hull History Centre. Marvell is a poet and politician with lifelong connections to Hull, and his relationship to the medieval monastic ruins of Hull and Yorkshire is a key focus for the project. Alongside the monograph 'Renaissance literatures of ruin: Spenser to Marvell', the project's findings will be disseminated through a journal article, conference paper and academic conference on Marvell, and through a school session, public lecture and the public exhibition 'Marvell and medieval Hull', produced in partnership with the Hull History Centre, and in collaboration with the leading Marvell expert, Professor Nigel Smith (Princeton).