Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1969. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliography.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1971. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 151-155).

No description available.

I explore Wordsworth and Byron's use of a mediating "other Being," or a third-person narrative voice, that functions as a "guide" through their autobiographical texts. After establishing this poetic voice, both poets employ their "other Being" to navigate spaces of ruin. Founded on fragments of memory and experience, as well as mediatory gaps, the poetry of Wordsworth and Byron illuminates the autobiographical poet's struggle with textual self-representation and the sustention of a poetic subjectivity that often substitutes for the poet's own. Through the rhetorical device of prosopopoeia, Wordsworth and Byron find distinct ways to create a voice that will continue to "speak" for them in the lines of their text. While The Ruined Cottage represents a version of Wordsworth's understanding of breakdowns and poetic subjectivity, Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage III and IV push Wordsworth's boundaries even to their limits and turn the autobiographical "other Being" into a "tyrant spirit."

The dissertation identifies two major lines of thought within the idea of 'solitude': the theme of retirement, a concern with social setting and environment, leading to retreat to the country; and the theme of isolation, a philosophical concern with individual identity and relationship with the world. It traces the development, through the eighteenth century and specifically in Coleridge and Wordsworth, from the overwhelming predominance of the retirement theme, to a concentration on the issues of isolation, springing out of but superseding those of retirement. The idea of solitude moves from a conoern with physical environment to an inspection of the processes of mind and its interaction with the world. Four eighteenth-century poets are discusaed, and the tensions that develop within their work: Thomson's reconciliation of retirement and action; Gray's concentration on the problem of serviceability in the world; Beattie's Minstrel who moves from isolation to the lessons of social experience; and Cowper's retreat which must yet generate useful employment. The dissertation turns briefly, for a comparison of differences in approach, to the works of Zimmerman and Rousseau, before focusing on the poetry of Coleridge and Wordsworth. It explores Coleridge's Conversation Poems, and the Ancient Mariner, referring also to the later prose writing and notebooks, and discusses Coleridge's concern with an individual's attempts to impose his own approach upon reality; the need to learn both individuality and acquiescence; and the search, continually renewed, for a resolving synthesis between them. Wordsworth's poetry is examined in detail, in particular his approach to the great solitary figures and to his own solitude; his probing of the balance between individual, distinct existence and absorption in the world; his realisation, ultimately, of the need for an understanding, not a resolution, of the tensions within the dilemma of self and relationship.

Thesis (M.A.)--Carleton University, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 96-98). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

This study argues that nationalism is concerned not only with relations and differences between rival nations, but is also related to questions of class, power, and representation within nations. It explores the development of a conservative form of nationalism in England which, following Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Late Revolution in France (1790), elaborates a defence of the hegemony of the aristocracy, in response to the increasing economic and cultural power of the middle class, born of the rapid growth of commercial and industrial economy. Literature is central in the development of this nationalism, and writings by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Scott, Disraeli, and more briefly, Dickens are considered. There are two distinct images of nationhood in England in the period. These are on the one hand a vision of nationhood which links the nation to the existence of a public, a residual aristocratic ideal of the nation which is defined within the terms of the discourse of civic humanism, and on the other hand a vision of England which identifies English nationhood with rural society, village community, and the private and domestic space of the home; an ideal of the nation which emerges in relation to commercial and industrial culture, and which becomes identified with the middle class. These two ideals of nationhood become the focus of a struggle of representations between aristocracy and middle class. The tensions which this struggle between these conflicting images of the English nation creates are explored, considering their implications for the politics and representation of national, class, and gender identities. This study demonstrates that debates about the movement from a landbased pre-industrial to an industrial society are framed within a broader debate about the nature and meanings of Englishness and English nationhood. The relationship of this nationalism to developing discourses of imperialism is also explored.

No description available.

Thesis (M.A. in English)--Washington State University, May 2009. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on May 21, 2009). "Department of English." Includes bibliographical references (p. 66-68).

This dissertation reconsiders sacred tropes in the Romantic poetry of William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, and John Keats within the context of ascetic performances and written saints’ lives. I argue that reading these poets as ascetic figures helps us to better understand Romantic isolation as a deeply social engagement, for an ascetic rejects his social milieu in order to call for the sanctification of a corrupt community. Asceticism redraws the lines of Romantic immanent critique of nineteenth-century England and newly explains the ghostly afterlives of poets whose literary personae transcend their biographical lives. Furthermore, this study takes up the ways in which the foundational ascetic tropes of Romantic poetry bind the major poets together in an impenetrable canon of writers with holy vows to poetry and to each other. My readings examine different kinds of ascetic vocation at play in the work of each poet, and I ultimately argue that this traditional support for the Romantic canon demands that we reconsider our critical attachments to Romanticism as the beginning of a secular literary tradition.