Literature in English, British Isles Commons^™

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 …

From Longinus To Tolkien: A Theory Of The Fantastic Sublime, Seth Wilson

English Department Theses

As concepts, the fantastic and the sublime share much in common. Both have the power to take a reader outside the scope of his or her own worldview and experience, and both share the paradoxical power to both elevate and humble the human spirit. So it is surprising that few scholars have explored the intersection between these two constructs, and none has attempted to systematically explore how this intersection operates in the context of literary theory. This thesis endeavors to build a theoretical framework for the fantastic sublime by exploring its constituent parts. First, I examine the contribution of the …

Religion In Sense And Sensibility, Erin R. Toal

The Kabod

Jane Austen’s first major novel that was published, Sense and Sensibility, exemplifies the shifting perspectives in religion during the Georgian period by exploring the virtues of its title through the lenses of the Anglicanism of Georgian England. This paper argues that Sense and Sensibility reflects Jane Austen’s worldview and identifies how it stems from the Neoclassical and Romantic fusion present in her religious belief.

Finding Inspiration In Darkness: The Exploration Of Obscurity In Romanticism Through The Works Of Lord Byron And Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Sarah E. Seal

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Through the works of Lord Byron and Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, I explored the function of the themes of darkness and obscurity in Romanticism. There was a clear connection between the inclusion of these themes and the rejection of the Enlightenment period, which is what I focused on in this thesis. I discovered that the Romantics found inspiration and beauty in the darker, stranger aspects of the natural world, while rejecting the logical and rational beliefs of the Enlightenment.

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 …

Review Of Dale Townshend And Angela Wright, Eds., Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism And The Gothic, Ellen Malenas Ledoux

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

“One Feeling In Such A Solitude”: Representations Of Love And Marriage In The Works Of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley And Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jenna E. Fleming

Student Publications

The early nineteenth century was characterized by a dynamic literary discussion and debate over the nature and effects of human relationships. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley, two of the foremost writers of the period, experimented with and drew conclusions about differing images of marriage within their works. Making use of this public literary genre, the couple engaged in a conversation with one another as they explored and refined their views and judgments of relationships including their own. The title of the paper is taken from the seventh chapter of the third volume of Frankenstein, in which Victor Frankenstein, …

Holy Places, Dark Paths: Till We Have Faces And The Spiritual Conflicts Of C.S. Lewis, Joshua G. Novalis

Senior Honors Theses

Although Till We Have Faces (1956) was written late in C.S. Lewis’s life (1898-1963), during the peak of his literary renown, the novel remains one of Lewis’s least known and least accessible works. Due to its relatively ancient and obscure source material, as well as its tendency towards the esoteric, a healthy interpretation of the novel necessitates a wider look at Lewis’s life-long body of work. By approaching Till We Have Faces through the framework of Lewis and the corpus of his work, the reader can see two principal conflicts that characterize the work as a whole, and, more specifically, …

Beyond The Pages: The Significance Of The Social Self Proposed In Jane Austen's Persuasion, Veronica Grupico

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This paper focuses on Austen's novel Persuasion and how she rejects the Romantic notion of the self defined by individualism, which leads to the breakdown of society. Instead of the Romantic self, with its emphasis on self-examination, retrospection, and emotion, Austen advocates for an older notion of the self, a view based in eighteenth-century notions of social networks, mutual responsibility, and the moral function of emotion. Persuasion links Romanticism’s self, which was popular at the time that Austen was writing, with the breakdown of society, arguing that not just social stability but much-needed social vitality depends on the interdependence and …

Charlotte Smith's Beachy Head: Science And The Dual Affliction Of Minute Sympathy, Kelli M. Holt

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Greatly illustrative of Adam Smith’s statement in his Theory of Moral Sentiments that the sympathizer must “adopt the whole case of his companion with all its minutest incidents; and strive to render as perfect as possible that imaginary change of situation upon which his sympathy is founded”––while also complementing notions of feeling from the work of Anna Barbauld––Beachy Head and its minutiae “renders” an utterly sympathetic argument, one void of gender conventions, that comments on nature's inhuman and human condition.

Luxury Romanticism: The Quarto Book In The Romantic Period, Matthew Hale Clarke

Dissertations

This dissertation explores the cultural presence of the quarto book in Romantic-era Britain and argues that the format classed the period's defining literary ideologies--from sentimentalism, to liberalism, to Wordsworthian Romanticism, to orientalism--as luxuries meant exclusively for the nation's wealthiest consumers. Chapter 1 situates the quarto within the context of the period's luxury debates and advances a conception of the quarto as the era's predominant luxury format. Focusing on Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village, Chapter 2 argues that early quarto editions of the poem classed the sympathetic feeling it celebrated as the unique privilege of a readerly elite and describes how …

Anna Seward And The Sonnet: Milton's Champion, Claudia Thomas Kairoff

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, And The Emergence Of Virtual Reality, By Peter Otto, Stacey Kikendall

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

Populism, Gender, And Sympathy In The Romantic Novel, By James P. Carson, Elizabeth J. Mathews

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

A Seat At The Table: William Lisle Bowles And The Development Of Romanticism, Jeremy B. Savage

Lawrence University Honors Projects

A study of the Romantic poet William Lisle Bowles. I challenge the modern critical perception of Bowles in order to argue that his place in the study of Romanticism has been drastically understated. It is my assertion that by reading Bowles thoroughly, paying specific attention to his influence on the beginnings of Romanticism, to his particular influence on Coleridge and to the critical advancements represented by the amalgamation of his actual poetry with his later critical reflections, affords us not only an understanding of Bowles’s active role in the development of Romanticism as it has traditionally been understood, but also …

The Realization Of The Romantic In "Adonais", Grace Cao

2011 Spring Semester

In every life, there comes a moment when one wonders if a greater meaning exists beyond this mundane, often sordid world. Is man merely the sum of countless inane struggles, or is there a loftier purpose towards which he can strive? Romanticism is an attempt to answer this question, and is shaped by the belief that there is indeed a more perfect plane which humans yearn to reach. Few works embody the spirit of this movement as well as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1821 elegy for John Keats, “Adonais.” By alluding to a Platonic world, idealizing nature, and expressing an attraction …

"I Unsex'd My Dress": Lord Byron's Seduction Of Gender In "The Corsair", "Lara", And "Don Juan", Alexis Spiceland Lee

Dissertations

The goal of this project is to posit a theory of how Byron’s texts, specifically through the development of his hero, construct gender and sexuality as styles of seduction that resist easy classification by binary systems. I propose that Byron’s works characterize gender through ironic performances of seduction that, because they reveal that binary structures lack a stable core, dissolve systemic differentiation and thus fatally complicate any attempt to force the individual into rigid categories of gender or sexual identity. Byron’s works deploy seduction as a tactic of ironic representation of both gender and sexual practice that is necessarily multiplicitous …

Celebrity And The Spectacle Of Nation, Jason N. Goldsmith

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

A decidedly promiscuous brand of renown, celebrity has a bad reputation. That reputation was characterised by Daniel Boorstin, who coined what has become a near-axiomatic definition of the celebrity as 'a person who is known for his well-knowness'.¹The tautological bent of Boorstin's definition seems to suggest the meretricious nature of celebrities, famous not because they have done anything to merit acclaim, but because their images have been widely publicised and promoted. According to this logic, celebrities are superficial personalities, bold-faced names, air-brushed faces; they are slick images manufactured for the moment. Celebrities signify all that is shallow about …

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 …

“Passions That Were Not My Own”: Critique And Preservation Of True Pastoral Life In Wordsworth’S “Michael”, Katie Homar

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

"Adjectives Of Mystery And Splendor": Byron And Romantic Religiousity, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

I will suggest that had the history of Christian metaphysics taken a different course than the one it did, it is likely that Byron's considerable objections to religion would have been diminished by at least one. About the particulars of Christian theology, he had little to say, his writings suggest a general discomfort with particular aspects of Christian metaphysics as they had developed by the nineteenth century.

An analysis of Byron's metaphysical/religious misgivings might serve to clarify the nature of his discontent, clearly showing that his particular "heresy" is radically distinct from others of the "Satanic school." It might also …

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 …

Romantic Agonies: Human Suffering And The Ethical Sublime, Terryl Givens, Anthony P. Russell

English Faculty Publications

This essay examines two poems depicting human anguish in order to explore a current in Romantic thought that implicitly yields some original and compelling insights regarding the problematic relationship between art and suffering. The focus is primarily on Wordsworth's narrative of Margaret's suffering in The Excursion, then more briefly on Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. In both cases Kant's ideas about the sublime provide us with a useful perspective from which to understand the issues these poems raise.

Wordsworth And Discovery: A Romantic Approach To Composing, Susan C. Critchfield

Theses Digitization Project

No abstract provided.

Spenser: Reflections And Parallels In The Romantic Poets, Sara Rivers Aderholdt

Theses

This paper calls attention to reasonable effects, noticeable echoes, and remarkable parallels of Edmund Spenser's philosophy and his treatment of myth and symbol as found in the Romantic poets.