This dissertation traces the meaning and scope of early modern complaint poetry. I argue that what I understand as a secular "poetics of dissatisfaction" arose to fill the void left when religious auricular confession was no longer an institutionalized practice, and that this mode of literary expression was itself shaped by the evolving legal discourse of complaining. These articulations of dissatisfaction cross genre, style, and medium, but they all share a common language with two prominent discourses: the penitential literature of the Reformation, which worked to refigure confession when it was no longer a sacrament; and juridical testimony, which regularly blurred the line between auricular confession in the ecclesiastical courts and secular jurisprudence in the common law courts. Complaint poetry investigates questions about evidence, sincerity, and the impossibility of ever doing--or saying--enough about despair; it also considers the imaginative implications of a post-Reformation world in which the consolation for despair might be its poetic expression. Critics have long seen emergent interiority as a defining characteristic of early modern poetry; however, I argue that complaint poems are argumentative, highly emotional, and committed to revealing a shattered self in publicly staged distress. In doing so, complaint poems not only trouble the borders of poetic subjectivity, but also provide a generative critique of cultural institutions that failed to provide consolation, supplanting those institutions with the possibilities of confessional expression and consolation in print and performance.

Last modified

• 09/14/2018

Creator

• Joanne Teresa Diaz

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2H73Q

Subject

• English

Keyword

• confession
• early modern
• juridical testimony
• complaint

Date created

• 2008-08-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright