Denys Van Renen – författare

Prompted by commercial and imperial expansion such as the creation of the Bank of England in 1694 and the publication and circulation of Ben Jonson’s The Staple of News in 1626, rapidly changing cultural, economic, and political realities in early modern England generated a paradigmatic shift in class awareness. Denys Van Renen’s The Other Exchange demonstrates how middle-class consciousness not only emerged in opposition to the lived and perceived abuses of the aristocratic elite but also was fostered by the economic and sociocultural influence of women and lower-class urban communities.Van Renen contends that, fascinated by the intellectual and cultural vibrancy of the urban underclass, many major authors and playwrights in the early modern era-Ben Jonson, Richard Brome, Aphra Behn, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Eliza Haywood, and Daniel Defoe-featured lower-class men and women and other marginalized groups in their work as a response to the shifting political and social terrain of the day. Van Renen illuminates this fascination with marginalized groups as a key element in the development of a middle-class mindset.

When scholars of cultural studies consider representations of the land by British writers, the Romantic poets continue to dominate the enquiry, as though the period right before the intensification of the Industrial Revolution offers readers one last glimpse of untarnished nature. Denys Van Renen instead examines the British authors writing in the decades following the Restoration of Charles II, writers whose literary works re-animate and re-embody the land as a site of dynamic interactions, and, through this, reveal how various cultural systems and ecologies shape notions of self and national identity.Van Renen presents a rich and varied cultural history of ecological exchange—a history that begins in the 1660s, with Milton and Marvell’s rejection of established Renaissance constructs, and ends with Defoe’s Farther Adventures, in which the noise of the persistent howls of animals pierces human representational systems, arguing that British literature from 1665-1726 represents a cognitive symbiosis between human and non-human.As humans attempt to reduce the adverse effect of the Anthropocene, the author ultimately proposes that the aesthetics of British writers from the Restoration and early eighteenth century might be mobilized in order to rebind humans to their environs.

The picaresque novel has always generated widespread appeal due to the charisma and charm of its roguish main characters, who live by their wits on the margins of society. Spanish and English satires feature the perseverance and resilience of picaros who skirt and challenge the overreach of authoritarian regimes. Critics who focus on the picaresque reflect this social animus but rarely address how these authors perceive marginal societies, as not only vulnerable peoples but also environments.What were the conditions that allowed the picaresque to flourish in Scotland? Spanning from 1748-1857, this study posits that England’s imaginative and physical re-engineering of Scotland prompts Scottish authors, and those of Scottish descent, to recognize not only the allyship between the picaro and local environments and climates, but also the power that stems from it. The book includes chapters on a diverse set of authors, including Tobias Smollett, Samuel Johnson, John Galt, Charlotte Lennox, Mungo Park, James Hogg, and Mary Seacole. They deploy the picaresque to foreground discrete and interconnected environments that are under duress because of English efforts to establish an imperial totality.What Van Renen calls the “Scottish picaresque” integrates the major characteristics of the genre with the picaro’s response to environmental precarity. Ultimately, the texts studied here model for readers how to eschew cartographic or imperial semiotics, and recognize physical features and places long forgotten or appropriated by the state for large-scale economic development.

While British drama of the long eighteenth century remains largely unexamined as registering ecological fears, its visual spectacle and settings allow the audience to grasp threats to environments across the globe.