The Body and the City: Feeling Paranoid in Ben Jonson's London

Abstract

This thesis examines the representations of bodies and city space in the literary and dramatic works of Ben Jonson. In particular, it explores the representation of bodies experienced as 'other' by the male subjects through which they are represented: bodies that physically, verbally, or symbolically threaten to overflow their own boundaries. Investigating how these representations engage with the social structures of emergent capitalism and its effects on the urban environment of London in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the thesis interrogates the ways in which representations of bodies are shaped by social and spatial factors. I read Jonson's work through a theoretical model of paranoia that underpins the seemingly distinct affective responses of anxiety, jealousy, abjection, and disgust, and which takes into account the period's turn to capitalist social structures and their manifestation in the early modern city. I argue that the two types of paranoia identified in psychoanalysis and critical theory - paranoia oriented towards bodies, and paranoid forms of knowledge - are brought together in Jonson's work, united in an uncertainty about the status of boundaries: bodily, spatial, and conceptual. The central proposition of this thesis is that the concept of paranoia helps us to understand Jonson's representation of bodies and city space, demonstrating that feelings of persecution demand both epistemological control over city space and the abjection of other bodies, processes which in Jonson's work are always interlinked. It therefore suggests a new reading of Jonson's London, in which anxieties about the status of the human body function to articulate, respond to, and create various models of the production, performance, and status of knowledge. Analysing the ways in which Jonson's writing performs and interrogates paranoia allows for a deeper understanding of these texts and of the wider culture of early modern London.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2019
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Naomi Baker (Supervisor) & Jerome De Groot (Supervisor)