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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
The Lodge In The Wilderness: Ecologies Of Contemplation In British Romantic Poetry, Sean M. Nolan
The Lodge In The Wilderness: Ecologies Of Contemplation In British Romantic Poetry, Sean M. Nolan
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation argues that contemplation is often overlooked in studies of British Romantic poetry. By the late 1700s, changing commercial and agricultural practices, industrialism, secularization, and utilitarianism emphasizing industriousness coalesced to uproot established discourses of selfhood and leisure, and effected crises of individuation in Romantic poetry and poetics. Closely reading poems and writing about poetry composed between the 1780s and 1830s by William Cowper, George Crabbe, Robert Bloomfield, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Stuart Mill, I probe the relationship between aesthetic, ethical, and emotional responses to depictions of toil, idleness, and leisure. I argue that ecologies …
Broken Harts: Mourning The Human/Animal Divide In Shakespeare’S As You Like It And Wordsworth’S “Hart-Leap Well”, Jennifer Jourlait
Broken Harts: Mourning The Human/Animal Divide In Shakespeare’S As You Like It And Wordsworth’S “Hart-Leap Well”, Jennifer Jourlait
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis compares the deer scenes in Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Wordsworth’s “Hart-Leap Well.” Both raise questions about man’s right to hunt animals with impunity. Shakespeare’s Jaques superficially takes up the issue of animal rights whereas Wordsworth’s personification of the stag evokes the reader’s sympathy for the animal.
Sensitive Plants And Senseless Weeds: Plants, Consciousness, And Elizabeth Kent, Leila Walker
Sensitive Plants And Senseless Weeds: Plants, Consciousness, And Elizabeth Kent, Leila Walker
Publications and Research
When a team of researchers in 2018 found that plants exposed to anesthesia appeared to lose consciousness, the press reported that plants might have a consciousness to lose. The ensuing debate revealed a gap between scientific and literary approaches to human and nonhuman consciousness that this article traces back to the botanical writing of the Romantic period. These concerns, I argue, are central to Elizabeth Kent’s Flora Domestica (1823) and Sylvan Sketches (1825), both botanical works that double as literary anthologies in order to expose a productive gap between literary and scientific knowledge. In a time when the distinction between …
Elizabeth Kent’S New Tales Of Botanical Friendship, Leila Walker
Elizabeth Kent’S New Tales Of Botanical Friendship, Leila Walker
Publications and Research
Elizabeth Kent has been considered a rather minor figure in the Leigh Hunt circle. However, this examination of her previously unknown children’s tales illuminates how Kent’s generic crossings establish a common emphasis on observation in the realms of botany, pedagogy, and poetry while suggesting that what happens beyond the observable world might be equally generative. Taken as a whole, Kent’s work constitutes a previously unacknowledged challenge to the Cockney School’s almost fetishistic attachment to the social. The identification of New Tales brings into focus Kent’s efforts to systematize friendship through her writing and clarifies her ambiguous response to Cockney amiability.
A World Ruled By Unknowns: The Psychological Effects Of The Supernatural And Natural Worlds In Emily Brontë'S Wuthering Heights, Jordan Cymrot
A World Ruled By Unknowns: The Psychological Effects Of The Supernatural And Natural Worlds In Emily Brontë'S Wuthering Heights, Jordan Cymrot
Student Theses and Dissertations
Emily Brontë (1818-1848) wrote Wuthering Heights in 1847 at a point of collision between Romantic thought and Victorian ideals. Her novel exemplifies a developed and deliberate effort to represent a world ruled by forces out of one’s control, the most evident example of this being the supernatural force that overtakes the novel. In her precise focus on the language and natural landscape that bind this novel together, her characters emerge as representative of the psychological complexity produced by the coexistence of the mundane and the extraordinary. My thesis focuses on the effects of the natural landscape and the forces that …
The Picturesque And Its Decay: The Travel Writing And Journals Of Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft, And Mary Shelley, Gabrielle Kappes
The Picturesque And Its Decay: The Travel Writing And Journals Of Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft, And Mary Shelley, Gabrielle Kappes
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This project puts forth the argument that when the late eighteenth century’s taste for nature and picturesque tourism had peaked, writers following in the picturesque tradition grappled with the limitations and confines of these aesthetic categories. In the chapters that follow, I present three authors, Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley, who are all dissatisfied with the conventions of the picturesque. Dorothy Wordsworth’s Alfoxden Journal (1798) demonstrates the nuances of the picturesque instability where distinctions between nature and the cultural production of nature have become muddied. I then examine three tour narratives in order to draw attention to how …
Enclosures And Dichotomies: Coexistence Vs. Distance In The Poems Of John Clare, Jordan P. Finn
Enclosures And Dichotomies: Coexistence Vs. Distance In The Poems Of John Clare, Jordan P. Finn
Theses and Dissertations
John Clare’s poetry emphasizes an affinity with environment by suspending the distinction between the inside (subject) and the outside (object). Clare’s identification with objects and perception rather than subjects and aesthetics renders his work as a prescient and radical example of ecological poetry in the Romantic period. Raymond Williams’ “green language” and Timothy Morton’s ambient poetics both cite Clare as an ideal figure for their above theories and evoke Clare as a writer who positions the environment as governing thought rather than thought governing the environment. This thesis especially relates Clare to Morton’s Ecology without Nature, a study of …
Gathering Sense From Song: Robert Browning And The Romantic Epistemology Of Music, Laura Clarke
Gathering Sense From Song: Robert Browning And The Romantic Epistemology Of Music, Laura Clarke
Publications and Research
No abstract provided.
Roots And Repercussions Of Romantic Feeling: Sensation And Affect In The Poetry Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge And William Wordsworth, Mary K. Cotter
Roots And Repercussions Of Romantic Feeling: Sensation And Affect In The Poetry Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge And William Wordsworth, Mary K. Cotter
Theses and Dissertations
Enlightenment emphasis on rationalism in philosophy and the arts prefigures Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s and William Wordsworth’s Romantic recovery of a subject’s empirical relationship to nature and the phenomenal world. Coleridge and Wordsworth respond to philosophical precedents that emphasize rationalism and the autonomy of a subject while introducing empiricism and sensation as primary components of the speaker’s experience. The poets delineate a fluid shift from the Enlightenment to Romanticism through an interchangeable reliance on Kantian and Burkean philosophical methods. The philosophy of Immanuel Kant follows the Cartesian cogito toward a similar end of reducing human experience to circumstance bereft of empirical …
Playing With Matches: Matchmaking As Authorship In The Nineteenth-Century Marriage Plot, Colleen Cusick
Playing With Matches: Matchmaking As Authorship In The Nineteenth-Century Marriage Plot, Colleen Cusick
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation examines the narrative treatment of matchmakers in British marriage plots across the nineteenth century. In an era of increasing state control over marriage and the rising ideology of romantic marriage, the matchmaker represents the communal courtship practices of the past. As such, she offers both a threat to the emerging status quo and a reminder of the persistence of superseded cultural forms in the modern marriage system. Simultaneously, she constitutes an image of female creativity and authority that speaks to concerns about the professionalization of novel-writing and the place of women writers within that profession. Through this focus …
"Fits Of Vulgar Joy": Play Anxiety In The Romantic Poets, Alison Powell
"Fits Of Vulgar Joy": Play Anxiety In The Romantic Poets, Alison Powell
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
"Fits of Vulgar Joy": Play Anxiety in the Romantic Poets considers the crucial but neglected role of play as a component of the imaginative faculty and as related to the development of moral sensibility in the Romantic era. It examines the Spieltrieb ("play drive") in the works of Coleridge, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Shelley, and John Clare to explore the tension between what is explicitly stated about the relationship between play, intersubjectivity, and aesthetics, and how play is actually depicted in the poetry and essays of the Romantic era. It works to identify how and with what objective the Romantics differentiated so …
Purloined Voices: Edgar Allan Poe Reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alexander M. Schlutz
Purloined Voices: Edgar Allan Poe Reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alexander M. Schlutz
Publications and Research
This essay unfolds the complex intertextual relationship between the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and that of Edgar Allan Poe. References to and extended borrowings from Coleridge’s poetry and philosophical texts mark Poe’s œuvre throughout, but – as is only fitting for borrowings from the great borrower Coleridge – they are never anything as simple as plagiarisms or acts of intellectual theft. As this piece demonstrates through readings of Poe’s early poetological text “Letter to B–,” the Dupin story “The Purloined Letter,” and the late tour-de-force prose-poem Eureka, tracing the recurrence of Coleridgean poetry and prose in the work …
Two Kinds Of Utility: England’S ‘Supremacy’ And The Quest For Completion In David Dabydeen’S The Intended, Kevin Frank
Two Kinds Of Utility: England’S ‘Supremacy’ And The Quest For Completion In David Dabydeen’S The Intended, Kevin Frank
Publications and Research
This essay concerns the Caribbean writer’s crucial confrontation with colonial literary models. In it, Kevin Frank argues that the central protagonist of David Dabydeen’s The Intended, the unnamed narrator, resembles the author in that he is torn between cultures (English, East Indian, and West Indian), and torn between two kinds of utility: one base, mechanical, and calculating, and the other, romantic. The latter predicament, Frank demonstrates, is a natural consequence of the convergence of romantic and utilitarian ideology underpinning British colonialism. Moreover, Dabydeen’s ambivalence about his allegiances and literary heritage is similar to that of one of his literary …
Emma And The Countryside: Weather And A Place For A Walk, Elizabeth Toohey
Emma And The Countryside: Weather And A Place For A Walk, Elizabeth Toohey
Publications and Research
Raymond Williams in The Country and the City dismisses Jane Austen's depiction of the land around her as simply "weather or a place for a walk." In Emma's ideology, however, there is a tension between an ostensibly apolitical stance, which is de facto conservative in working to maintain the status quo, and the extent to which a more progressive agenda can be seen through the social mobility of certain principle characters, albeit by "conservative means." For all the leisure, picnics, and parties that constitute the greater part of Emma, labor is evident and valued. The country may be largely …