English Catholic literary culture, 1640-1660: Reading, politics, and emotion

我的研究将探讨在动荡的1640年代和1650年代英国天主教徒的文学文化。它将询问这些普遍多样且富有想象力的文本如何试图构建情感、忠诚和共同信仰的社区。我会问作家们是如何在内战和英格兰共和国的出现所引发的政治忠诚和宗教认同的分裂中，清晰地表达出天主教社区认同的形式的。我将密切关注阅读，无论是从阅读实践的材料痕迹，还是从阅读和解释的隐喻。近几十年来，关于英国内战和早期现代天主教的文学和历史研究有了很大的发展，而关于中世纪天主教的写作却被严重忽视了。因此，我的工作不仅将揭示文学史中被忽视的一个方面，而且还将有助于对文学文本、情感和记忆之间关系的批判性辩论。该项目将探索在天主教家庭中以手稿形式流传的小团体诗歌；虔诚的诗歌和散文，包括理查德·克拉肖的晚期作品；天主教戏剧，包括詹姆斯·雪莉和约瑟夫·西蒙斯的戏剧；保皇主义的浪漫;还有政治传单。包括英语和拉丁语，印刷和手稿，并在英国和在大陆流亡侨民之间产生的文本，我的研究将阐明各种形式和流派，通过英国天主教徒代表他们的历史和文化剧变的经验。自从奈杰尔·史密斯（Nigel Smith）认为英国革命期间文学体裁发生了转变，大卫·诺布鲁克（David Norbrook）在20世纪90年代恢复了英国共和主义的历史和文学以来，这一时期的学术研究变得多样化，包括被忽视的作家和问题。艾莉森·谢尔令人信服地论证了天主教写作对早期现代想象的重要性，并揭示了天主教文本是如何回应流亡和忠诚分裂的。苏珊娜·蒙塔、克里斯托弗·海利、亚瑟·马洛蒂和莫莉·默里从殉难、建国、文化焦虑和皈依的角度探讨了天主教文学。然而，所有这些学者只对本世纪中叶的作品给予了短暂的关注，而把注意力集中在伊丽莎白晚期和复辟后的作家身上，尤其是索斯韦尔和德莱顿。我的论文将是对英国革命时期天主教文学的第一次持续研究。为了理解这些文本是如何表达经验的，我将采用两种相关的方法。首先，我将借用Brian Cummings和Freya Sierhuis在早期现代研究中所说的“情感转向”的关键术语。我将通过研究天主教文学中情感社区的修辞结构，为情感、体现和主体间性的辩论做出贡献。其次，我的研究将以阅读史为基础。它将密切关注变革文本遭遇的物质痕迹和地点，从令人反感的乡村别墅到流亡的宗教学院。发展威廉·谢尔曼关于阅读的参与性、互动性的工作，我将强调特定解释群体之间的差异。我将对Stephen Zwicker和Kevin Sharpe的中世纪阅读模式提出质疑，认为它完全是敌对的，狭隘的“政治”，通过揭示英国天主教徒阅读当代经验的各种方式。我的项目将揭示复杂和一般多样的方式，其中中世纪天主教写作重新配置政治，情感和社区建设。它将修正我们对英国文学和政治史上这一前所未有的时刻的理解，并为在早期现代研究中接近宗教-政治身份、情感和阅读的联系建立新的途径。

My research will explore the literary culture of English Catholics during the turbulent 1640s and 1650s. It will ask how these generically varied and richly imaginative texts attempt to construct communities of affect, allegiance, and shared belief. I will ask how writers articulated forms of Catholic communal identity amid the splintering of political allegiances and religious identities provoked by the Civil Wars and emergence of the English Republic. I will pay close attention to reading both in terms of material traces of reading practice and in terms of metaphors for reading and interpretation. Whilst literary and historical scholarship on both the English Civil Wars and early modern Catholicism has greatly diversified in recent decades, the writing of mid-century Catholics has been sorely neglected. My work will thus not only reveal a neglected aspect of literary history but also contribute to critical debates over the relationship between literary texts, emotion and memory.The project will explore coterie poetry circulating in manuscript among Catholic families; devotional poetry and prose, including Richard Crashaw's late works; Catholic drama, including the plays of James Shirley and Joseph Simons S.J; royalist romance; and political tracts. Encompassing English and Latin, print and manuscript, and texts produced both in England and among the exile diaspora on the Continent, my research will illuminate the variety of forms and genres through which English Catholics represented their experience of historical and cultural upheaval. Since Nigel Smith argued that literary genres were transformed during the English Revolution and David Norbrook recovered the history and literature of English republicanism in the 1990s, scholarship on this period has diversified to include overlooked writers and issues. Alison Shell has convincingly argued for the significance of Catholic writing to the early modern imagination and revealed how Catholic texts responded to exile and divided loyalty. Susannah Monta, Christopher Highley, Arthur Marotti, and Molly Murray have explored Catholic literature in terms of martyrdom, nationhood, cultural anxiety, and conversion. Yet all these scholars pay only passing attention to the mid-century, concentrating instead on late Elizabethan and post-Restoration writers, notably Southwell and Dryden. My thesis will be the first sustained study of the Catholic literature of England's revolutionary decades. In order to understand how these texts articulate experience, I will adopt two related methodologies. First, I will borrow the critical terminology of what Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis have called the 'affective turn' in early modern studies. I will contribute to debates over affect, embodiment and inter-subjectivity by examining the rhetorical construction of emotional communities in Catholic literature. Secondly, my inquiry will be grounded in the history of reading. It will attend closely to the material traces and sites of transformative textual encounters, from recusant country houses to exiled religious colleges. Developing William Sherman's work on the participatory, interactive quality of reading, I will emphasize the differences between particular interpretative communities. I will contest Stephen Zwicker and Kevin Sharpe's model of mid-century reading as exclusively antagonistic and narrowly 'political' by revealing the variety of ways in which English Catholics read contemporary experience. My project will reveal the complex and generically diverse ways in which mid-century Catholic writing reconfigured politics, emotion, and community-making. It will revise our understanding of this unprecedented moment in English literary and political history and establish new avenues for approaching the nexus of religio-political identity, affect, and reading in early modern studies.