Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Inquiry And Provocation: The Use Of Ambiguity In Sixteenth-Century English Political Satire, Jason James Zirbel

Dissertations (1934 -)

Nearly all literary theories for a millennium have defined satire according to its linguistic clarity and moral certainty. Not until recently have theorists such as Dustin Griffin recognized that satire often comprises an ambiguity that moves it beyond the mere policing of established moral boundaries. This project considers how four sixteenth-century satirists—Thomas Wyatt, George Gascoigne, Thomas Deloney, and Thomas Nashe—exploited satire’s capacity for open-ended inquiry to address the rapid political and economic changes that typified the early modern period. Rather than relying on established moral codes to domesticate uncertainty, these writers used satire to explore and analyze government bureaucratization, the …