Recent scholarship demonstrates that the metaphor of taste, which represents aesthetic discernment as gustatory sensation, foregrounds ideologically laden questions of individual and cultural identity across a wide swath of literary history. But critics have yet to discover that taste is but one component of a much broader network of metaphors that figure the mind as a human body that eats and digests the world of objects and ideas. Using two approaches to metaphor from cognitive science, Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Fauconnier and Turner’s theory of "conceptual blending," I relate metaphors like reading-is-eating, ideas-are-food, and contemplation-is-digestion within a metaphor system that I call "the digesting mind." Applying this insight to organic aesthetics, I argue that poets expand organicism's metaphorical basis beyond the familiar poem-as-plant by introducing a mind that consumes plantlike poems. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Emerson, Whitman, and William Carlos Williams link writers and readers in an ideational economy figured as nutritional exchange. As each poet negotiates questions of creativity and literary influence, his biological, philosophical, political, and aesthetic beliefs converge in metaphors of the digesting mind. After introducing my approach in chapter one, I examine the digesting mind's importance in the evolution of organic aesthetics from English romanticism to American modernism. In chapter two, the digesting mind destabilizes Coleridge's influential distinction between mechanism and organicism by revealing, in Biographia Literaria, his anxiety that a diet of mechanistic literature will reduce the organic mind to a machine. Chapter three reads Wordsworth's Prelude in similar terms, as an allegory representing mental development as nutritional growth, in which the imagination requires an organic diet of poetry and nature. In chapter four, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass Americanizes the digesting mind with an Emersonian aesthetic that locates power in the poet’s present transformation of the literary past into future mental nourishment. In chapter five, Williams adapts Emerson's digesting mind with a pragmatic aesthetics of experience. By representing his Objectivist poems as fruit, as in "This is Just to Say," Williams relocates the organic ideals of vitality and unity from the poem, as aesthetic object, to the audience's felt experience of reading-as-eating. / 2017-11-04T00:00:00Z

My thesis that Coleridge employed universal images of the supernatural and traditional Christian symbols to illustrate the Mariner’s religious conversion in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The basis for this proposition is that Coleridge made religion the Rime’s theme. The following validations of the religious theme proposal will be offered in these chapters: (1) The religious theme synthesizes two popular but unsatisfactory thematic statements: “estrangement” and “sacramental vision.”; (2) Coleridge’s philosophical system is founded upon the postulation of a supernatural reality. The Mariner’s conversion may be seen as his change from Aristotelian conceptualism (which recognizes one reality - nature) to Platonic dualism (which recognizes two realities - nature and supernature).

by Eric Kwan-wai Yu. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 250-264). / Preface --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter 1 --- "A Portrait of the Romantic as a Solipsist The ""Romantic Revolt,"" Lyricism and Selfhood" --- p.9 / Chapter Chapter 2 --- Romantic Alienation Reconsidered --- p.38 / Chapter Chapter 3 --- Burdens of the Past The Poetic Vocation and Elitist Leanings --- p.83 / Chapter Chapter 4 --- "Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Early Poetry Sensibility, Radical ism and Reception" --- p.121 / Chapter Chapter 5 --- "Egotism Established The Reception of Wordsworth's Poems (1807) and the General Attack on the ""Lake School""" --- p.153 / Chapter Chapter 6 --- "Egotism Transformed Hazlitt's Criticism, the Acceptance of Wordsworth, and Twentieth-Century Romantic Scholarship" --- p.195 / Notes --- p.224 / Works Cited --- p.250

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2009. / Directed by Mary Ellis Gibson; submitted to the Dept. of English. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed May 5, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 194-207).

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Alchemical imagery and ideology is present in many Romantic works of literature, but it has largely been overlooked by literary historians in their contextualization of the time period. The same can be said for mysticism in general, of which alchemy is a subset. This project accounts for alchemy in the works of transcendental philosophers and writers as it contributes to some of the most important conversations of the Romantic time period, particularly the reaction against empirical philosophy and the articulation of creative processes. The transcendental conversation is a transnational one, encompassing Germany, Britain, and America, with its use of alchemy also following this transnational progression. The German idealists developed an epistemology that took from alchemical precepts that in turn informed their spiritual models of genius and the creative process. German idealism largely influenced Romantic conceptions of art and creativity, which then contributed to the Romantic ideal of a poet-prophet. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Nathaniel Hawthorne further developed their own models of the creative process by incorporating alchemy as an image of the transformation from vision into art. I examine Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and Hawthorne's "The Artist of the Beautiful" for their alchemical imagery that articulates such a genius ideal. I also found, however, that these two Romantic works express an awareness of artistic limitations and frustration in the face of this ideal, which illustrates the ambiguity these two writers are known for. But alchemy, as a discourse of contradictions and their negotiation, is a site that accommodates the tension between a posited ideal and the reality of actual experience. As such, alchemy, as an underlying ideology to the poet-prophet, allows for flexibility in an artist's identity. Furthermore, as a deeply personal philosophy of transformation, alchemy's image as a work of art suggests the artist's personal investment in the creative process, which is necessary to art's viability in an increasingly materialistic world.

My thesis studies Hartley Coleridge and Dorothy Wordsworth to redress the unjust neglect of Hartley’s work, and to reach a more positive understanding of Dorothy’s conflicted literary relationship with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I provide a complete reassessment of the often narrowly read prose and poetry of these two critically marginalized figures, and also investigate the relationships that affected their lives, literary self-constructions, and reception; in this way, I restore a more accurate account of Hartley and Dorothy as independent and original writers, and also highlight both the inhibiting and cathartic affects of writing from within a familial literary context. My analysis of the writings of Hartley and Dorothy and the dialogues in which they engage with the works of STC and William, argues that both Hartley and Dorothy developed a strong relational poetics in their endeavour to demarcate their independent subjectivities. Furthermore, through a survey of the significance of the sibling bond – literal and figurative – in the texts and lives of all these writers, I demonstrate a theory of influence which recognizes lateral, rather than paternal, kinship as the most influential relationship. I thus conclude that authorial identity is not fundamentally predetermined by, and dependent on, gender or literary inheritance, but is more significantly governed by domestic environment, familial readership, and immediate kinship. My thesis challenges the long-standing misconceptions that Hartley was unable to achieve a strong poetic identity in STC’s shadow, and that Dorothy’s independent authorial endeavour was primarily thwarted by gender. To replace these misreadings, I foreground the successful literary independence of both writers: my approach reinstates Hartley Coleridge’s literary standing as a major poet who bridged Romanticism and Victorian literature, and promotes Dorothy Wordsworth as one of the finest descriptive writers of nature and relationship.

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In recent decades there have been many attempts to pull Austen into the fold of high Romantic literature. On one level, these thematic comparisons are useful, for Austen has long been anachronistically treated as separate from the Romantic tradition. In the past, her writings have essentially straddled Romantic classification, labeled either as hangers-on in the satiric eighteenth-century literary tradition or as early artifacts of a kind of proto-Victorianism. To a large extent, scholars have described Austen as a writer departing from, rather than embracing, the literary trends of the Romantic era. Yet, while recent publications depicting a “Romantic Austen” yield impressive insights into the timeliness of her fiction, they haven't fully addressed Austen's participation in some of the most crucial literary debates of her time. Thus, it is my intention in this essay to extend the discussion of Austen as a Romantic to her participation in Romantic-era debates over emergent literary categories of authorship and realism. I argue that we can best contextualize Austen by examining how her model of authorship differs from those that surfaced in literary conversations of the time, particularly those relating to the high Romantic myth of the solitary genius. Likewise, as questions of solitary authorship often overlap with discussions of realism and romance in literature, it is important to reexamine how Austen responds to these categories, particularly in the context of a strictly Romantic engagement with these terms. I find that, though Austen's writing has long been implicated in the emergence of realism in literature, little has been written to link this impulse to the earlier emergence of Romantic-era categories of authorship and literary creativity. I contend that Austen's self-projection (as both an author and realist) engages with Romantic-era literary debates over these categories; likewise, I argue that her response to these emergent concerns is more complex and nuanced than has heretofore been accounted for in literary scholarship.

This thesis is the first full-length study of the English clergyman and historian William Cave (1637-1713). As one of a number of Restoration divines invested in exploring the lives and writings of the early Christians, Cave has nonetheless won only meagre interest from early-modernists in the past decade. Among his contemporaries and well into the nineteenth century Cave’s vernacular biographies of the Apostles and Church Fathers were widely read, but it was with the two volumes of his Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Historia Literaria (1688 and 1698), his life’s work, that he made his most important and lasting contribution to scholarship. The first aim of the thesis is therefore to build on a recent quickening of research into the innovative early-modern genre of historia literaria by exploring how, why, and with what help, in the context of late seventeenth-century European intellectual culture, Cave decided to write a work of literary history. To do so it makes extensive use of the handwritten drafts, annotations, notebooks, and letters that he left behind, giving a comprehensive account of his reading and scholarly practices from his student-days in 1650s Cambridge and then as a young clergyman in the 1660s to his final, unsuccessful attempts to publish a revised edition of his book at the end of his life. Cave’s motives, it finds, were multiple, complex, and sometimes conflicting: they developed in response to the immediate practical concerns of the post-Restoration Church of England even as they reflected some of the deeper-lying tensions of late humanist scholarship. The second reason for writing a thesis about Cave is that it makes it possible to reconsider an influential historiographical narrative about the origins of the ‘modern’ disciplinary category of literature. Since the 1970s the consensus among scholars has been that the nineteenth-century definition of literature as imaginative fictions in verse and prose – in other words literature as it is now taught in schools and universities – more or less completely replaced the early-modern notion of literature, literae, as learned books of all kinds. This view is challenged in the final section of this thesis, which traces the influence of Cave’s work on some of the canonical authors of the English literary tradition, including Johnson and Coleridge. Coleridge’s example, in particular, helps us to see why Cave and scholars like him were excluded lastingly from genealogies of English studies in the twentieth century, despite having given the discipline many of its characteristic concerns and aversions.