Gil, Daniel Juan2014-07-222014-07-2220112011https://repository.tcu.edu/handle/116099117/4294In conversation with the early modern horticultural handbooks and new phenomenology studies, this project examines the literary garden to better understand how early moderns imagined the affective exchange between their humoral bodies and garden. Recently, new body scholarship has tended to emphasize an early modern embodied subject who is open to a continuously changing environment that wreaks havoc on the early modern subject and his or her embodied affectivity. It is argued that this supposed exchange did not confer a sense of an autonomous self, but rather an unstable self. However, one problem with these findings is their assumption that the environment was unmanageable. Studying the garden in early modern literature and guidebooks sheds light on the debate by showing the degree to which early moderns believed they could manage their environment and shape their embodied subjectivity. I maintain that the garden is central in this regard because it was envisioned as a highly cultivated environment designed to produce foreseeable humoral affects upon the embodied subjects who entered. To this end, I examine the gardens in three significant texts of the period, arguing that each author employs the garden in his or her work to demonstrate how one's self-experience can be shaped and managed through the garden to impact their sense of selfhood and contribute in the formation of a national and/or personal identity. Gender is also a focus throughout my discussion, and my final chapter looks at how Mary Wroth employs the garden in her sonnet sequence as a place to direct her internal climate and represent her embodied self. Included are chapters on Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Mary Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, concluding with a look at Milton's Paradise Lost in the epilogue--Abstract.Format: OnlineengNo search engine accessShakespeare, William, 1564-1616 Knowledge Physiology.Spenser, Edmund, 1552?-1599 Knowledge Physiology.Wroth, Mary, Lady, ca. 1586-ca. 1640 Knowledge Physiology.Milton, John, 1608-1674 Knowledge Physiology.English literature Early modern, 1500-1700 History and criticism.Mind and body in literature.Gardens in literature.Gardening in literature.Self in literature.Text