For convenience and for control, the analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne's style presented here is limited to a selection of his short stories. The short story form will serve better to illustrate the thesis of this paper, that Hawthorne's style is used deliberately to create, in part, the neutral territory he desired. The shorter form has been chosen, additionally, because it requires of its author a certain discipline--superfluous elements of style must be abandoned so that the story can get on about its business. Hawthorne's short fiction, moreover, contains nearly all the stylistic techniques which he later used in his novels.

Together Dorothy and William translate. a simple tour into aesthetic loveliness To his sister the journey was the juxtaposition of impoverished society and pastoral elegance. To Wordsworth the tour was a reawakening of poetic Impulse. Through his intense feeling for natural beauty, Wordsworth became the poet of all mankind..

This thesis explores the influence of the voluminous travel literature of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries on the imagination of Romantic writers such as Wordsworth and Byron, with particular reference to the theme of suffering in travel. It examines the ways in which Romantic travel, and Romantic writings about travel, are often 'scripted' by a body of prior travel literature which today is largely overlooked. The travel texts in question all foreground the elements of danger and discomfort in the travelling experience, and the thesis begins by arguing that an interest in the traveller's misadventures was an integral part of the appeal of travel writing in this period, constituting almost a mode or sub-genre within Voyages and Travels. Taking one strand of this literature of 'misadventure', the narrative of shipwreck, mutiny and other maritime misadventures, Chapter 1 explores the different rhetorical strategies used by writers to recount the sufferings of travellers. Accounts by John Newton, William Dampier, John Byron, George Shelvocke and others illustrate, broadly, a shift from Providentialism to sentimentalism in the handling of misadventure; they illustrate also the various philosophical, theological and political issues which are involved for any reader trying to make sense of the sufferings described. Chapter 2 then considers how these conventions of misadventure are borrowed by another sub-genre of Voyages and Travels, the exploration narrative. Using the accounts of James Cook, John Ross, Edward Parry, James Bruce and Mungo Park, the chapter argues that in being thus exploited by explorers, a further layer of political significance - touching on matters of empire and modernity attaches itself to the idea of suffering in travel. Chapters 1 and 2 illuminate positive stimuli to the Romantic interest in misadventure, showing how suffering in travel could be regarded as signifying, variously, divine election, authenticity, moral worth, political protest, and much else besides. Chapter 3 is short contextual chapter which suggests that there was also a negative stimulus to the Romantic taste, for misadventure, in the form of a rapidly growing, diversifying tourism. Focussing especially on the picturesque tourist delineated by William Gilpin, and the classical Grand Tourist influenced by Joseph Addison, it suggests that Romantic writers and travellers prized discomfort and danger in travel not only for its own sake, but also because it served to distinguish them from other types of recreational traveller. Chapters 4 and 5 discuss Wordsworth and Byron respectively, showing how the conventions and attitudes explored in Chapters 1 and 2, and the use of travel as a mode of social distinction explored in Chapter 3, play out in both the writings and the actual travels of these two major Romantic figures. Both men present themselves as misadventurers, and borrow rhetorical strategies from the earlier travel literature to do so. At the same time, Wordsworth and Byron each borrow different elements from the earlier texts, or make a different inflection of the same inherited conventions. Exploring these differences, and referring to a range of texts notably the Salisbury Plain poems, The Borderers and the 'Analogy Passage' of The Prelude for Wordsworth, and Childe Harold, Don Juan Canto 2 and The Island for Byron chapters 4 and 5 articulate the very different political, philosophical and aesthetic points being made by Wordsworth and Byron as they pose, both on the page and in actuality, as suffering travellers.

Thesis advisor: Judith Wilt / Though contemporary evangelical Protestants have shown an increased interest in the fine arts, scholars have often seen the aesthetic history of Anglo-American evangelicalism as one marked by hostility and indifference. In contrast to this view, this study argues that the history of evangelicalism's intellectual engagement with the fine arts has been complex and varied. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, evangelicals writing in a variety of denominational periodicals carried on a robust inquiry into aesthetics. This study traces the rise of this discourse among Anglo-American evangelicals and maps some of the main features of the evangelical theoretical landscape between 1830 and 1900&mdash;a high point of evangelical critical activity. <italic>Christians, Critics, and Romantics</italic> describes how evangelicalism's contact with Enlightenment thought initiated a break with the Puritan aesthetic tradition that contributed to the growth of a modern aesthetic consciousness among some eighteenth-century evangelicals. By the 1830s, evangelical aesthetic discourse had come under the influence of romanticism. Not only did many evangelical writers define art according to the expressivist principles adduced by major romantic critics but some went even further in asserting, after Coleridge and the German idealists, that art is an embodiment of a higher reality and the imagination an organ of transcendental perception. Evangelical critics, moreover, valued art for its contribution to the stability and progress of &ldquo;Christian nations&rdquo; such as England and the United States. By refining the moral feelings of individuals, fine art helped to safeguard the socio-moral cohesion of Protestant &ldquo;civilization.&rdquo; For a time, evangelical critics attempted to celebrate art in romantic terms while insisting on art's subordination to traditional Christianity, but such an arrangement ultimately proved unsustainable. By the end of the nineteenth century, a rift had opened up within Anglo-American evangelicalism between conservatives and liberals. This rift, caused in part by the spread of romantic thought and by various other secularizing trends, had important implications for evangelical aesthetic thought. While liberals continued to advance high claims for the spiritual and educational potential of art, conservatives largely abandoned the philosophical exploration of art in order to turn their attention to the threats of Darwinian evolution and biblical criticism. Nevertheless, both liberals and conservative fundamentalists retained in their respective ways many of the aesthetic assumptions of the romantic tradition. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

This project is about what I am calling an “erotic epistemology” in nineteenth-century English elegiac poetry, a condition or event in a poetic text in which the discourses of love and knowledge are, to use a term Shelley liked to describe the experience of love, “intermixed.” The persistence of this inter-discourse suggests some fundamental connection between the desire for love and the desire for knowledge. Curiously, these performances of erotic longing insist urgently in the rhetorical, formal, and somatic registers of elegiac poetry in the nineteenth century. The confrontation with death that elegy stages is ideal for thinking about the relationship between erotic desire and poetic knowledge. As the limit case of a mind confronting an ultimately unknowable condition, the furthest expression of an impossible desire—the desire for the dead—elegies are love poems as well as death poems. This dissertation argues that Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais for John Keats (1821), Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam for Arthur Hallam (1850), Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Ave Atque Vale for Charles Baudelaire (1867), and Thomas Tod Stoddart’s The Death-Wake (1831), perform the poetics of mourning as an erotic discourse, and allow an intimate understanding of a dead other that is an experience of pleasure. Much scholarship on the concept of eros considers it nearly synonymous with sexual desire and bodily pleasure. This project establishes a mode of reading elegy through its figures and forms that conceptualizes eros in these poems beyond sexuality, and without the burdens of biography and history. By stepping outside the critical confines of generic convention, literary influence, and eros-as-sexual want, this dissertation reevaluates the interpretive possibilities of erotic desire and language in a genre that is not commonly read as an amorous mode of speech. For these elegists, knowledge itself is an object of amorous desire, and epistemological want is a motive force of poetic mourning. These poems arrive at the pleasure of this knowledge through verse forms and figures of speech that perform an intimate textual relationship between the living and the dead, and when these linguistic events occur, the elegies reveal themselves as love poems.

This work reopens the question of Nietzsche’s relationship to Early German Romanticism through critical readings of moments of enchantment in the writings of Novalis. It unveils the seemingly conciliatory gestures of enchantment as moments of discord between subject and figure, self and world. These readings attend to the tropes, ironic registers, and performative dimensions of texts that occlude rather than facilitate a strict demarcation between Novalis and Nietzsche. That the thinkers in question are shown to anticipate their critical reception is consonant with the present work, which, in foregrounding both the entanglement between self and language and the materiality of reading, attunes itself to enchantment as the manifestation of compulsion, imposition, and ecstasy. The principle of continuity that allows Nietzsche and Novalis to be read and to read each other is asceticism. Its secret ally, following Nietzsche, is the absolute will to truth. In its function of assigning an aim to the aimless, asceticism provides for both truth and its incessant undermining, for form as well as flight. It engenders a mode of expression that is only as true as it is provisional. Through a reading of Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian as the collision of epistemological anxiety and its anthropological stopgap, this work advocates an operation of double-reading that views the conceptual sphere itself as palliative and the nonconceptual as the possibility of an ascetic flight from ossification. In setting such double-reading into motion, this work traces the subterranean relations between Novalis and Nietzsche that allow the proto-Modernism of the former to interrogate the residual Romanticism of the latter. An erudite study that combines problems of representation with discussions of the theater, painting, and music, this dissertation seeks to reenchant questions of interpretation and reading that constantly threaten to petrify into all-too-self-evident truths.

This dissertation examines the role of Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz as the Romantic Other in the formation of Russia's Romantic identity during his Russian sojourn between 1824 and 1829. Analysis of Mickiewicz's image as the poetic Other, with respect to his Russian contemporaries, reveals the process that led to the establishment of their individual and national identities during the transition from Classicism to Romanticism in the second half of the 1820s. Examination of materials gathered from a variety of sources - poetry dedicated to, and inspired by, Mickiewicz, reviews of his work, correspondence and memoirs - demonstrates how contemporary Russians perceived Mickiewicz: a Polish poet, all at once a representative of Western literature and culture, a Lithuanian bard, a Slavic Byron, and a poet who was also close to Russia's cultural and poetic tradition. Special consideration is also given to Mickiewicz as the Other in Pushkin's poetic paradigm "bard vs. prophet", through which the Russian poet expressed and interpreted his own poetic identity in the context of Western and Russian literature. Such a multi-dimensional image of Mickiewicz reflects the Russians' struggle to establish their own Romantic identity in response to Western literary and cultural models, as well as one that would reflect Russia's own history and tradition. By examining Mickiewicz's so far unexplored position as the Romantic Other, this dissertation provides a new perspective on the significant role that the Polish poet and his work played in the critical period of Russia's transition towards its own Romantic literature.

Writers from the Romantic period embraced Locke's principle of linguistic arbitrariness as they reacted to the threat to their literary authority posed by the standardizers of English such as Samuel Johnson. Their texts articulate a desire to maximize the potential for authorial freedom that Locke's theory of language offers. By exploiting arbitrary properties of language, writers hoped to transcend the linguistic limits imposed by the standardizers and thus to confirm their status as creative practitioners of the English language. Priestley, one of such writers, capitalizes on the arbitrariness of signs as described by Locke when he envisions a perfect language that shall be universally used in the future millennial kingdom. Predicated upon the arbitrary connection between words and "things of considerable consequence," Priestley's universal language scheme allows the writer to ponder meanings outside the semantic range of standard lexicography. In Pigott's Political Dictionary (1795), Locke's semantic theory becomes the means to radicalize Locke's political ideas, especially the idea of the right of revolution. The arbitrariness (or voluntariness) of signification encourages Pigott to revise Johnson's standard definitions in a way that articulates French Revolutionary principles. Wordsworth sides with Francis Grose--the author of A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785)--in placing a high value on vulgar English. But unlike Grose, he contends that rural language is "more permanent," i.e. durable, than a refined language. Wordsworth's description of how rustics' language achieves durability reveals that he is deeply conscious of all linguistic signs being arbitrary. Furthermore, the naturalism that Wordsworth attributes to his poetic diction results from his appropriation of the arbitrariness that rules the language of rustics. Coleridge emphatically denies the role of linguistic arbitrariness in his theorization of the symbol. The signifying process that produces the symbol, however, operates by seizing on the possibilities for semantic expansion that the arbitrary quality of the sign opens up. As a result, the privileged status of the symbol, and hence of the "natural" in Coleridge's system, is thrown into question. My reading of Coleridge deconstructs the opposition of natural / arbitrary in his thinking about language. By exerting arbitrary power over the ways in which words stand for ideas, Romantic authors sought to restore the vitality of their literary language and to lead the continued progress of their mother tongue.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 1973. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2000. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 322-334). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.