Vanishing Points: Perspectival Metaphysics in the English Renaissance

Abstract

Taking as its starting point the ut pictura poesis tradition of artistic theory, this dissertation examines how the poets and dramatists of the English Renaissance transformed mimetic strategies originally developed in the fields of art and architecture into unprecedented literary topoi and figures in their own right. The project focuses primarily on the practice of linear perspective, which simulates visual experience by subordinating abstract space to the artificial logic of the “vanishing point.” It demonstrates how English writers developed the initial idea of linear perspective as an artificially arranged, delimited point of view into a body of descriptive practices that constitute what I term “perspectival metaphysics.” Experiments in perspectival metaphysics in the works of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Andrew Marvell reveal the assumptions that underlie normative vision, and vision’s relationship to subjective experience and its interpretation. Vanishing Points concludes that the rhetorical strategies of spatial description developed by early modern English writers are an integral part of the broader epistemological shift from renaissance humanism to the increasingly complex modes of scientific and philosophical rationalism that characterized the European seventeenth century.