Corporate poetics and the Virginia Company of London, 1607-1655

Nicholas K Mohlmann, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation answers calls for new literary consideration of the Old Dominion's archive. This study counters the dismissal of the literature of seventeenth-century Virginia as fragmentary and inconsistent, and constructs a literary history of early modern Virginia through the lens of corporate personhood. Through careful attention to issues of authorship and textual production, I treat the Virginia Company of London as a single, corporate author whose texts and literary legacy shape the discourse surrounding Virginia for the rest of the century. By theorizing a corporate poetics that allows us to understand what it means for a corporation to engage in authorship, I correct for a diffuse version of Virginia's literary history that belies the colony's archive in order to more thoroughly understand how non-human actors contributed to and shaped the literature of early America.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Bross, Purdue University.

Subject Area

American literature

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