Title: Trees, Whales, Planets: The Poetics of Awe in Early Modern English Literature

Abstract: In his 1653 Treatise of Fruit-Trees, arboriculturist Ralph Austen outlines a sequence of “three Affections…which worke powerfully upon the spirits”: hope, which leads to joy, which in turn produces admiration, or what today we call awe. Austen traces the way encountering trees (the largest life forms most residents of early modern England would ever see) leads to awe, but that sense of astonishment suffuses much of seventeenth-century English literature’s most audacious experiments in genre and poetics. Wonder drove readers and writers in technical, imaginative, prescriptive, and speculative literature to redefine their own place in the world as fundamentally, if often vexedly, interlinked. Looking at specimen cases from among early modern treatments of trees, whales, planets, and other natural phenomena, this talk explores the way awe reformulates the workings of poetry and community in the literature of the period, and contemplates a recuperatively communal eco-logic subtending the making and sharing of knowledge, in the seventeenth century and in ours.

Co-sponsored by the Department of English, CHASS Dean's Office and the Center for Ideas and Society, Department of History, Health Humanities Disability Justice (HHDJ), Student Success and the Department of Society, Environment, and Health Equity (SEHE)