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This thesis deals with an important but still imperfectly understood aspect of Vala/The Four Zoas - - how the manuscript of the poem evolved. The entire crystallization of the manuscript of Val a/The Four Zoas is here understood as the gradual regenerative process of a poem which collapsed as a result of a fatal structural failure. The seriousness of this collapse rests on the fact that the earliest Vala, which was concerned with the Fall and Judgement of the cosmic Man, evolved as a comprehensive summary of the fragmentary myths in Blake’s early works. The formation and collapse of the earliest Val a is identified as analogous to the rise and fall of the myth of Ore. The thesis is in two parts. Part I has three chapters, focusing respectively on Ore's origin, the gradual formation of Ore's myth, and its completion and disintegration. Part II begins with a Preliminary Argument outlining the five stages of the evolution of Vala/The Four Zoas. Detailed discussion on each stage follows. Stage 1 is concerned with the first regenerative process, the genesis of Night I as a Preludium. During stage 2 this Preludium is converted into Night I, and is paralleled with the following Night in terms of myths of Fall and Creation. Stage 3 focuses on fluctuations of the myth, the achievement of a basic structure for Nights I-VIIa, and a contest between the formula of Four Zoas versus the idea of Spectre and Emanation. Stage 4 discusses the complicated evolution of Nights VIIa-IX, in which Blake struggles to realize the original significance of the culmination of Ore's myth. Stage 5 brings about the final transformation of the poem, including its development towards the structure of Blake’s myth as found in Jerusalem.

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With reference to Wordsworth's suggestion that the 'love of nature' leads to the 'love of man', this thesis examines claims that a sympathetic engagement with the natural world can contribute to human well-being and social progress. It considers how such claims might be substantiated by surveying a range of literary representations of the natural world between 1775 and 1900. Categories of human well-being are explored in three contexts: valuing and accessing the countryside, botany and attitudes to animals. These accounts are focused in discussions of literary encounters with particular genera: mid-Victorian seaweed collecting and the satirical treatment of the great apes. The ecocritical groundwork of Bate and Kroeber is extended to examine a range of non-canonical texts that confirm and complement, but also occasionally contend, the Wordsworthian approach. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which the human negotiation with the living world is complicated by gender identity. Gender affects access to the countryside and determines the public context in which knowledge about the natural world is represented and shared. However, this thesis offers a contributionist literary history in which an interest in other species has advanced women's social status in terms of mobility, education and opportunities to participate in science and politics. This work takes its theoretical impetus from environmentalist and feminist cultural theories. The ideas of thinkers such as Murray Bookchin, on social ecology, and Freya Mathews, on the ecological self, have been particularly influential. The present analysis concludes in the belief that, in challenging the gendered hierarchy in the self-other opposition, such ideas represent a sophisticated continuation of the Romantic critique of the problematic relationship to the natural environment that exists in capitalist society. In so doing, ecocritical approaches make for a fruitful reconsideration of Romantic and Victorian nature literature.

Thesis--University of Pennsylvania, 1920.

"Dissertation der Ludwig-Maximilians-universität zu München."

Although it is now widely accepted that the modern British novel is grounded in Romantic literary practice and ontological principles, Ford Madox Ford is often not regarded as a significant practitioner of (and proselytizer for) the new prose aesthetic that came into being near the start of the twentieth century. This dissertation argues that Ford very consciously strove to break away from the precepts that had informed the traditional novel, aiming instead for a non-didactic, autotelic art form that in many ways is akin to the anti-neoclassical art of the British High Romantic poets. Ford felt that the purpose of literature is to bring a reader into a keener apprehension of all that lies latent in the individual self--a capacity that he felt had atrophied in a rational, rule-abiding, industrialized culture. Impressed by the way that the French realists and naturalists disclosed the human condition, and fully aware of the descriptions of consciousness put forward by Pater, George Moore, Bergson, Wagner, Nietzsche, and William James, Ford worked to specify the strategies by which a novelist could realize his/her goal of making a reader apprehend that which can never be conveyed by direct statement. Ford felt that by heightening the individual's self-awareness, the "new novel" could effect an apocalyptic transvaluation of British society. Like his Romantic forebears, Ford felt that this increased breadth and intensity of individual consciousness can be realized only by means of a literary practice which is grounded in convention-breaking principles: exploration of the tension between social order and human compulsion; extended consideration of non-rational, especially unconscious, states of mind (such as dreams, telepathic experiences, sudden venting of repressed desire); description of "common" experiences; use of colloquial diction and disjunctive temporality; avoidance of narrative closure; use of a descriptive method (impressionism) that promotes non-optical "vision"; advocacy of subjective, even solipsistic, definitions of truth; and criticism of positivist values. While the extent of Ford's influence on later writers is difficult to measure, he clearly was one of the pioneers of a distinctly new commitment to fiction as an art form whose purpose and guiding principles are romantic. / Graduate

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / The object of this study is to examine the principle works of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), to establish him as a philosopher and theorist of romanticism and to what extent his theories were incorporated in the theories of the French romanticists, especially between the years 1827-1830. Vico posed the basic principles of romanticism by starting with a rejection of Cartesian principles and the classical standards and taste imposed by Aristotle and the Italian classicists. He insisted that history is organic, possessing its peculiar form of evolution and its own laws, as is literature, which reflects the history of the individual and societies. Vico maintained that poetic creativity is primarily intuitive rather than rational. The primitive poet's rich sensory imagination, unique fount of his lyrical creativity, diminished as his rational faculties developed, with a consequent loss of his power to create sublime poetry [TRUNCATED]

The purpose of this study is to measure the ideology of Romanticism in men and women and determine if there are any gender differences in Romanticism. As illustrated in various past studies, in order to draw a most accurate conclusion, it may be helpful to examine Romanticism scores with other constructs. Therefore, other associated variables will be included in this study, one of which is perceived parental romanticism level. A parallel perhaps may be drawn between perceived parental romanticism levels and individual's actual romanticism level. Are individuals who perceive their parents as more romantic more romantic? A measure for intra familial relationships will also be included in this study to assess the relation between young adults and their parents, parental dysfunction, and marital relation of the respondent's parents (Lachar & Gruber, 1995). A measure of erotophilia- an openness and appreciation of sex and sexuality also will be included in this study because it is expected, though not formally hypothesized, that openness to sex and sexually-related activities may correlate with romanticism.

Abstract of Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Illinois, 1927.