The principal motive for this diploma thesis was to prove or to falsify the known theoretical possibility of interconnection between two different (non-bordering) literatures - that of Germany and that of Spain, via the works of their two essential 19th century poets, respectively, Heinrich Heine and Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. This connection is often assumed, especially in the critical editions of the works of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, as well as in some literary handbooks. Nevertheless, these assumptions often lack clear explanations. Regarding the methods of proving or disproving these theories mentioned above, I have drawn on all accessible theoretical works, analysing (mainly German) influences on the works of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. I also found it pertinent to view the works of both authors throughout time and place, in an attempt to identify analogies not only in the world of literature, but also in their real lives. Last but not least, I have tried to apply my own critical analysis to selected poems and legends of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer to support the theoretical works with concrete examples. Concluding from the evidence of their contemporaries, as well as from the theoretical works of the literary critics, I have confirmed that neither Heine nor Bécquer had mastered the other language. In...

This thesis examines the conscious amalgamation of conflicting forms in Byron’s verse, and how these forms strain to create meaning in the processes of his poetry. Through a series of close readings and critical engagements with other Romantic poets, I endeavour to show how Byron’s poetry is often a rich site of contention between revolutionary and conservative impulses; both in its style and subject matter, and more often than not, in the complicated relationship between them. Beginning with Byron’s problematic place in the English Romantic canon, I attempt to lay a foundation for my claims that for all his mistrust of closed systems and predetermined positions there remained an urging desire to reconcile definitive artistic contour with internal form-developing process in many of his most intense poetic engagements. In his efforts at reconciling an awareness of the ever-moving provisional nature of subjectivity with a deep-rooted demand for evaluative permanence, Byron habitually employs a hybrid poetic idiom which seeks to be both timeless and time specific. In many of his most distinctive compositions, Byron holds a so-called ‘High Romantic’ lyrical mode, in which meaning is immersed in a persistent flowing rhythm, in tension with an eighteenth-century rhetorical style in which the careful placement of weighty words offsets its continuity to striking effect. By bookending my enquiry with Byron’s penetrating discursive conflicts with the naïve lyrical impulses of Wordsworth’s blank verse and what he perceived as the rhetorical appropriations of Keats’s poetry, I wish to demonstrate that Byron’s poetry enacts a curious meeting of nature and culture by a refusal to cleave them.

Although the field of German Romantic Orientalism has been growing in recent years, the prolific writer E.T.A. Hoffmann has largely escaped critical attention. This study of his oeuvre reveals, however, that it was shaped and influenced by both the scholarly and popular orientalist discourses of his time. Furthermore, Hoffmann satirises literary orientalist practices even as he takes part in them, and so his work exposes the ambivalence of the apparent German veneration for the ‘Romantic’ Orient. While Hoffmann responds to the Romantic image of the Orient set up by his predecessors (J.G. Herder, Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel), he does so in order to reveal both the uses and the limits of this model for the Romantic artist in the modern world. The Orient serves as an inspiration for Romantic art, and thus Edward Said’s claim that the Romantics appropriated the East merely for the rejuvenation of European literature must be acknowledged. Nevertheless, as an extremely self-aware writer, Hoffmann does not utilise this approach uncritically. My thesis shows how Hoffmann responded to the image of the Orient as it was produced by writers, musicians, and scholars inside the German-speaking lands. The Orient resists successful imitation, as his texts acknowledge when they turn a critical eye towards German cultural production. Furthermore, Hoffmann’s famous criticism of nineteenth-century society is enhanced by comparison of German and oriental characters, with the latter often coming out more favourably. Hoffmann’s tales therefore demand a reassessment of the view that the Romantics constructed the Orient exclusively as a paradisaical land of poetic fulfilment. His (self-) reflective response to the nineteenth-century treatment of the Orient in Germany marks him out as an original – and essential – voice in Romantic Orientalism.

published_or_final_version / English Studies / Master / Master of Arts

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Carl Loewe (1796-1869) was a prolific composer of works for voice and piano with an output exceeding 400 pieces. Just as Schubert pioneered Lieder as a new genre of art music in the nineteenth century, Loewe can be credited for his comparable innovation with the ballad, a narrative song that depicts a story. Though Loewe is often considered a conservative musical figure in the nineteenth century, later romantic composers like Richard Wagner and Hugo Wolf held his ballads in high regard, as they show Loewe's compositional originality in boldly producing drama through the piano-singer format. This document displays how Loewe in his ballad cycle Gregor auf dem Stein, Op. 38 (1834) creates a continuous musical drama to enhance a theological legend. This work is an example of how Loewe foreshadows aspects of later German Romanticism, more fully realized by Wagner and Wolf, through use of musical and dramatic continuity, progressive tonality, motives, and declamatory vocal style.

This thesis -- originally entitled “Reckoning the Unnamed Fabric”, both a cultural study of the poetics of ecological consciousness and the ecology of poetic consciousness -- investigates the post-Romantic legacy informing John Burnside’s (b. 1955) poetry from The hoop (1988) to The Light Trap (2002) as a case study. The thesis argues that a developing aesthetic form and movement in subject derive from Burnside’s increasing involvement with ecological thought and practice. This move to the poetry of the oikos begins with an investigation of the self through the reconciliation of subject with object (or human with nature), and latterly has moved into a sustained reflection upon the idea of dwelling. This thesis relates the chronological development across Burnside’s nature poetry to an aesthetic infused with religious iconography and language, which via an evolving motif-poem of ‘world-soul’ or ‘communal fabric’ increases in its secular and empirical inflection. I read Burnside’s elevation of historical materialism s a progression in Wordsworthian craft and as a result of the poet’s pragmatic reflection on dwelling; I argue that the poetic consolidation of the intrinsic value of nature as an active and guiding spirit promotes nature less as a place for inhabitants than as the site and point of relation. The argument responds to Burnside’s transatlantic perspective from which he questions what it means to live as a spirit, and what a poetics of ecology can achieve in respect to the human subjective lyric and the need to transcend the human into the collective. To address these questions, which are implicit in Burnside's oeuvre, I draw upon Heideggerian poetics and American post-Transcendentalist Romanticism. I locate Burnside’s poetics within philosophical, aesthetic, and ecological frameworks. First, Burnside’s poetry is primarily a poetics of ontology that understands the ‘I’ within the midst of things yet underpinned by epistemology/hermeneutics; second, Burnside exhibits neo-Romantic poetry that has engaged with Modern American poetry -- it is this fusion that I call post-Romantic; third, the ecological constitutes both Burnside’s political stance and his aesthetic-poetic stance. I read the latter as a reflection of Jonathan Bate’s notion of the ecopoem as the “post-phenomenological inflection of high Romantic poetics”, an idea which is most apposite when read in relationship with Burnside’s path towards the metaphysical inscribed in the historical.

This thesis is significant for the knowledge it offers concerning the influence of Napoleon Bonaparte's personality and career upon the character and the work of Lord Byron. It is significant because of the light it throws on both Napoleon and the culture of Europe during his era. This study is significant in the insight it indirectly gives into the psychological phenomenon of hero-worship, to which it gives a more universal application through the medium of Byron's attitude toward Napoleon.

W. H. Auden represents an important example of a twentieth-century poet who has developed his style and technique under the influence of traditional and modernistic ideas. Though Auden's poetic stance is a modern one, he is an interesting example of a contemporary writer whose fascination for Romanticism is reflected in his work. This thesis looks at the influence of Romanticism and Modernism in his short poetry.