Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 76-11(E), Section: A.

Adviser: David Scott Kastan.

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When he introduced Pierce Penilesse to his readers in 1592, Thomas Nashe did not call the desperate pamphleteer a persona, and he did not describe him as a literary device. Pierce, he wrote instead, was a "paper monster," not fashioned but "begotten" into something curiously like life. The next decade would bear Nashe's striking description out. Answered, ridiculed, and petitioned in a series of pamphlets, Pierce seemed to take on a life of his own, inspiring other authors to appropriate and rewrite him in their own works. "Personal Effects" studies the remarkable proliferation of personae like him in the 1580s and 1590s, a period during which the device found itself at the center of a rapidly expanding, but also a deeply uncertain, literary culture.

During the last decades of the sixteenth century, the expansion of the book trade, the migration of manuscript poetry into print, and the emergence of a consumer reading public changed the cultural status of literature. As its pace and volume grew, literary production began, in one critic's words, "to be conceived as a valuable activity in its own right, with its own personnel, rules, history, and conventions." But the burgeoning discourse on literary production was also an anxious one, in part because it was a discourse whose central concepts---not least the concept of authorship---remained in important ways undeveloped, and in part because increased publication brought literary writing into contact with an unnervingly diffuse and anonymous reading public. The fictional personae that I study in this project came into being as remedies for the anonymity and distance that print circulation seemed to impose on literary discourse, distance that was countered by the personae's vivid imaginary presence. In their enduring afterlives, moreover, they provided a set of terms for the discussion of questions of poetic identity, authority, and merit. My dissertation finds in these personae a window onto a new history of English literary culture in the 1580s and 1590s, a history that captures that culture's negotiations of aesthetic value, discursive authority, and literary identity as they unfolded. It was in the paper monsters it begot, I argue, that a burgeoning literary field became visible to itself.

Early modern personae were powerful fictions because they were collective ones, fashioned and refashioned over and over again by various writers, readers, and publishers. Each of the dissertation's chapters focuses on a particular persona, moving between its original version and its rewritings by others. The first chapter examines a series of ghost stories that resurrected the romance writer Robert Greene after his death in 1592---stories, I argue, that turned Greene's ghost into an allegory of the eerily virtual world of print publicity. My second chapter examines Colin Clout's paradoxical status as both Edmund Spenser's most textually mobile character---cited and addressed by a range of other poets---and a nostalgic symbol of oral presence. The project's third chapter traces the paths of Philip Sidney's two personae, Philisides and Astrophil, from The Arcadia and Astrophil and Stella through a series of prose works and pastoral elegies that worked to reclaim the posthumously published poet for the privacy and exclusivity of the coterie. The fourth chapter traces the literary critical discourse that emerged around Thomas Nashe's alter ego Pierce Penilesse in Nashe's pamphlet quarrel with Gabriel Harvey. As I suggest in a coda, the persona's hold on the imagination waned as it was displaced in the seventeenth century by the emergent concept of literary authorship---a concept, ironically, that the persona had helped to create. The modern author could come into being, I maintain, only once the persona had prepared the way by articulating and animating a specifically literary form of identity.