RECOVERING THE PARTICULARITIES OF ENGLAND

Every redefinition of literature, and every intervention in the aesthetic system, is necessarily an intervention in other contexts and systems of value. In the case of the epyllion, the redefinition of literature, through the strategies of shame, presupposes a particular understanding of gender as fluid, even hermaphroditic. In The Unfortunate Traveller, Nashe acknowledges that the pursuit of the poetics of displacement, in this history of the reign of Henry VIII, not only undermines teleological structures, it also constitutes a highly unconventional kind of national chronicle: “All the conclusive epilogue I wil make is this; that if herein I have pleased anie, it shall animat mee to more paines in this kind. Otherwise I will sweare upon an English Chronicle never to bee out-landish Chronicler more while I live.” For Nashe, the redefinition of literature through displacement and marginality has ramifications for his understanding of history, especially its relationship to the reader and the ways its ideological goals are reflected in its formal conclusions. A particular understanding of the nature of the literary not only presupposes a particular definition of gender, it also presupposes a particular definition of selfhood. As the late sixteenth-century debate over the nature of literature engages with the relationship between private and public experience, it inevitably raises questions about the role of the individual in the nation. The literary debate is, inescapably, a political, ontological and gender debate.