Thesis--Wisconsin. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 219-221).

This study explores the formation and evolution of Mary Shelley's philosophy of sympathy, one which she continued to revise and refine throughout her lifetime. Her novels, journals, and letters reveal a persistent desire to understand what she perceived to be a deeply fraught emotion, a moral sentiment grounded in paradox. Engaging with the Moral Sense philosophy of Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), David Hume (1711-1776), and Adam Smith (1723-1790), Shelley insists that sympathy lies at the very heart of our ethical being, encouraging recognition of and respect for the other. Yet, as she demonstrates in her fiction-from Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) to Falkner (1837)-when felt to excess, sympathy can mutate into an unnatural and harmful emotion capable of provoking antisocial, immoral, incestuous, and even suicidal behaviour. More than this, Shelley's investigation of sympathy exposes its serious limitations. Predicated on a similarity to self, sympathy, Shelley suggests, often fails when confronted with difference. Finally, through multiple perspectives, Shelley illustrates the complex and contradictory motivations behind sympathy, showing that it can arise from genuine benevolence, self-interest, or a combination of the two, an entangling of intentions that serves to further complicate this moral sentiment. Ultimately, Shelley's philosophy of sympathy acknowledges its shortcomings and potential dangers but nonetheless celebrates sympathy as a social virtue, as the locus of our moral selves.

In this thesis, I use nonlinear understandings of the palimpsest in two distinct ways in order to explore both how Shelley constructs a palimpsestic relationship between Falkner and Frankenstein, and the ways in which this palimpsestic relationship is thematized through the interactions and identities of Falkner’s characters. In Chapter One, I use the figure of the palimpsest to uncover the untapped affective and philosophic potentiality of Frankenstein and Falkner, a potentiality that reveals itself only by considering each text as being in an intimate, unabating dance with the other. Chapter Two then ingests the figure of the palimpsest and investigates the ways that Falkner engages with what I call the embodied palimpsest of the nineteenth-century woman, whose identity constructs itself through simultaneous acts of effacement and reanimation. Through this kind of reparative reading, I aim to reclaim Falkner from its moneyspinner status and to show its layered complexities of storytelling, theme, and philosophical inquiry. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

This dissertation focuses on a Romanticism that was profoundly global in scope, and examines the boundary-crossing literary techniques of William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley. These authors saw identity as delimited by artificial borders, and we witness in their work competitions between local and global, immediate and infinite, home and away – all formulated in spatial terms. This thesis argues that by using motifs and philosophies associated with “borderless” global travel, these authors radically destabilized definitions of nature, history, and the home. Wordsworth and the Shelleys saw the act of travel as essentially cosmopolitan, and frequently depicted spaces outside of familiar boundaries as being rich in imaginative vitality. Their fiction and poetry abounds with examples of North American primitivism, radical modes of transportation, and unknown territories sought by passionate explorers. Importantly, they often used such examples of foreignness to rejuvenate familiar spaces and knowledge – these were individuals determined to retain a certain amount of local integrity, or connection with the reluctant minds who feared alien contexts. As such, they were each aware of the fragility of embedded minds, and the connection of these minds to bordered historical contexts. Aware of the dangers posed by uninhibited imaginative movements, they depicted travel as an artistically seductive activity. Their impulse as authors was thus to use global experiences as a tool of literary expression, while refraining from a total abandonment of local responsibility. This dissertation therefore argues that the imaginative experience of space in the Romantic period was profoundly split, tethered on the one hand to custom and familiarity, and on the other aspiring to boundless global freedoms.

This dissertation focuses on a Romanticism that was profoundly global in scope, and examines the boundary-crossing literary techniques of William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley. These authors saw identity as delimited by artificial borders, and we witness in their work competitions between local and global, immediate and infinite, home and away – all formulated in spatial terms. This thesis argues that by using motifs and philosophies associated with “borderless” global travel, these authors radically destabilized definitions of nature, history, and the home. Wordsworth and the Shelleys saw the act of travel as essentially cosmopolitan, and frequently depicted spaces outside of familiar boundaries as being rich in imaginative vitality. Their fiction and poetry abounds with examples of North American primitivism, radical modes of transportation, and unknown territories sought by passionate explorers. Importantly, they often used such examples of foreignness to rejuvenate familiar spaces and knowledge – these were individuals determined to retain a certain amount of local integrity, or connection with the reluctant minds who feared alien contexts. As such, they were each aware of the fragility of embedded minds, and the connection of these minds to bordered historical contexts. Aware of the dangers posed by uninhibited imaginative movements, they depicted travel as an artistically seductive activity. Their impulse as authors was thus to use global experiences as a tool of literary expression, while refraining from a total abandonment of local responsibility. This dissertation therefore argues that the imaginative experience of space in the Romantic period was profoundly split, tethered on the one hand to custom and familiarity, and on the other aspiring to boundless global freedoms.

This thesis aims to understand Percy Bysshe Shelley's attitude towards the role of the poet in society as an usher of progressive change. To do this, it examines his metaphysics, chiefly his contact with the doctrines of idealism, which crystallised at the dawn of his life through his intimate relationship with the works of Plato, the early engagement with French materialists, English philosophers like Priestley and Hume & a later one with Lucretian materialism, and his deep entanglement with the first modern proponent of anarchism, William Godwin - who could be described as a perfectionist by some or as utilitarianist by others. By doing that the thesis seeks to shed light on how these doctrines influenced Shelley and how he conversed with and critiqued them, revealing the intricacies of his work because, in Shelley's philosophy, the nature of differentiation between the two, that is between materialism and idealism, is notoriously problematic. The beginning of the thesis serves to engage with Shelley's early contact with materialist doctrines, their fast repudiation in their pure form and his later critique in "Cloud" and response to them. The materialist influences of Shelley are pondered, as well as some of the possibilities of interpreting Shelley in a materialist way. Next, Shelley's...

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Texte remanié de: Thesis Ph. D.--Faculty of English, Cambridge university, GB. / Bibliogr. p. 243-256.

Thesis (M.A.)--Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 2003. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 2843. Typescript. Abstract precedes thesis as preliminary leaves iii-iv. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 118-126).

Inaugural-Dissertation. Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin.