Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Samuel Daniel’S Lyric Reception: The Role Of Poet-Critics From Wordsworth To Winters, Caleb Mcghee

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Elizabethan poet Samuel Daniel was popular in his day, producing lyric, dramatic, and narrative poems. Contemporary anthologies, however, memorialize him primarily as a lyric poet, one that usually gets few entries. My thesis shows how Daniel had a minor reputation as a lyric poet by the 1960’s, despite having high-profile admirers. These well-known poet-critics who engaged with his work are essential to analyzing his lyric reputation: owing to the Romantic emphasis on the lyric, I begin with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s reception of his lyrics in the 19th century. I then analyze the turn of the century …

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

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.

"The Most Glorious War Recorded In The British Annals”: Portugal In British Figurations Of The Peninsular War, Manuela MourãO

English Faculty Publications

[First paragraph]

“THE MOST GLORIOUS WAR RECORDED IN THE BRITISH ANNALS,” AS ROBERT Southey described it in the dedication of his History of the Peninsular War,1 the conflict that brought together Portugal, Spain, and Britain against Napoleon’s armies between 1807 and 1814 was a dominant preoccupation of the British public in general, and of the first generation of Romantics in particular.2 Many critics have shown the extent to which the Iberian uprising against the tyranny of Napoleon galvanized the British people, united the British nation, and afforded Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge a renewed opportunity to sympathize with the cause of …

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

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 …

Spontaneous Minds And Electric Romanticism: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Dylan, Joplin, Sasha Tamar Strelitz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation postulates a sub-category of Romanticism: electric Romanticism. As opposed to its “acoustic” forebear, electric Romanticism exists in an electric age, beginning after Henry David Thoreau’s rumination on the telegraph wire as an electric rendering of the æolian harp image. Romantic poets used the æolian harp to analogize the act of writing activities set into motion by spontaneous thoughts, a central attribute of the Romantic literary movement. The modernized electric version of the æolian harp—the telegraph wire—signals that electric Romanticism branches off from its source and evolves along with technology to engage more synchronously with the spontaneous.

Electric Romantics …