•  
  •  
 

Author Biography

Mary Trull is a Professor of English at St. Olaf College. Her monograph, Performing Privacy and Gender in Early Modern Literature, was published by Palgrave McMillan in 2013. She has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and has published articles in ELR: English Literary Renaissance, Religion and Literature, JMEMS: Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and elsewhere on authors including Aphra Behn, Lucy Hutchinson, Anne Lock, Mary Sidney-Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, William Shakespeare, and Mary Wroth. Her book manuscript in progress, Lucretian Transformations: English Women Writers, 1640-1690, explores the impact of Lucretius and Epicurean physics on women writers of the seventeenth century.

Abstract

In his didactic epic, De rerum natura, the Roman poet Lucretius rejects the unity of affect and genre in Homeric epic. Instead, in Lucretius anger is anti-heroic: the human race is demeaned by fear, cowering before a fabricated vision of vengeful gods. The gods are not angry, and human fear is therefore absurd, even shameful, since it leads to outrageous acts of appeasement that violate basic human decency. When Lucy Hutchinson, the first English translator of the full De rerum natura, approached the task of writing an epic version of the book of Genesis, affect was already a central, though vexed, structuring element in epic. Drawing upon Lucretius’s scenes of the material dissolution of the cosmos into atoms, Hutchinson imagines a Christian Apocalypse crucially shaped by the anger of a punishing God, the fear and shame of human sinners, and a natural world that is in a complex mirroring relationship with human beings. Hutchinson’s revision of the epic, contrary to Lucretius’s teaching, places fear and anger at the center of the form, but shades these affects with shame. While the anger of the gods is a key structure of epic, Hutchinson’s portrayal of divine anger leads to an analysis of shame and its recuperative potential.

Keywords

early modern women writers, epic and lucretius, atoms and literature, christianity and epic, affect and early modern literature, anger and early modern literature, shame and early modern literature

Download

Share

COinS