Vagrancy and homelessness become pressing issues in early modern England. They are not only a result of economic and demographic developments alongside changes in land usage and property distribution in the transition from a feudal society to an absolutist monarchy and a proto-capitalist economy. But the legal regulation and the policing of vagrancy also plays a crucial part in the formation of what will be the modern nation state. In this context, rogues and vagrants are figures of social and spatial mobility that challenge and subvert territorial and hierarchical social and political orders. And as such they become objects and subjects of fascination in various genres and literary forms at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th century. From rogue ballads to prose pamphlets and the particular early-17th century genre of the city comedy, they populate texts that belong largely to popular forms of literature and that are crucial for the formation of a literary market place and for a redefinition of ‘literature’ as a product of the market place. This seminar will be looking both at their mobility at the various fringes of society and how the construction of such marginal figures is discursively mobilised for the reflection upon social, spatial and also highly gendered orders.
Please be aware that this course will be held as a three-hour class, so that we will have both the seminar (2 hours) and the reading course (1 hour) every week. |
