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The end of the eighteenth century witnessed an imaginative mass migration as authors wrote about withdrawing from society. This thesis traces the origins of 'Romantic reclusion' in the works of Cowper and Wordsworth, particularly Cowper's poem The Task and Wordsworth's unfinished masterwork The Recluse, which epitomise the tradition. Romantic reclusion differs from 'solitude' and 'retirement' in that its motives were social. Cowper and Wordsworth wrote about withdrawing in order to criticise the increasing commercialism and competition they saw in British society. Both poets imagined seceding into a community of individuals who would care for a shared set of values, envisaging this as a form of non-violent political protest leading to reform. The thesis builds on recent studies of Romantic community, and develops Raymond Williams's cultural criticism, to refute the New Historicist position that Romantic writing elides history. It proceeds by historicising Cowper's and Wordsworth's concepts of reclusion, tracing echoes of their extensive reading about this subject in what they wrote. Romantic reclusion emerges as an artistic attempt to defend the individual against the dehumanising effects of contemporary society. Its aims can be grouped under four interrelated headings-'creative', 'medical', 'political', and 'natural'-which form the basis of the chapter divisions. Chapter One argues that Cowper and Wordsworth both presented Milton as a precedent for their poetic reclusion. They withdrew from literary society and cut themselves off from the diction of eighteenth-century poetry, because they believed that it turned words into luxury items which could only be purchased by the imaginations of a few. Cowper's translations of Madame Guyon and Wordsworth's modernisations of Chaucer both attempted to develop a plain style which would unite a wider, non-hierarchical community of readers. Chapter Two explores the origins of Cowper's reclusion in his spiritual crisis of 1763-5. Beginning with a study of medical books owned by Cowper's doctor, Nathaniel Cotton, it argues that Cotton regarded Cowper's illness as a product of eighteenth-century models of sociability. Both Cowper and Wordsworth employed Robert Burton's concept of 'Honest Melancholy', or sorrow for the state of one's country, to critique social competition and call for new models of community. Chapter Three examines Cowper's and Wordsworth's presentations of reclusion as the best response to the violence of the American and French Revolutions. Drawing on the works of Classical and modern historians, both poets argued that political revolutions would only succeed once individuals learned to renounce self-interest and govern their selfish passions. The 'retired man' becomes the unexpected political hero of The Task, which in turn forms the basis for Wordsworth's conception of The Recluse. Finally, Chapter Four explores Cowper's and Wordsworth's interests in natural theology, arguing that both poets built on the works of writers including Calvin, David Hartley, and Joseph Butler to explain the psychological mechanism by which reclusion in nature could help to reform the mind, eliminating the selfish passions and teaching individuals to live in an active, mutually responsible community.

The Prelude and David Copperfield reveal strikingly similar patterns of their heroes' development from boyhood to manhood; the idiosyncrasy of their growth can be found in its retrogressive rather than progressive aspect.

The thesis examines Thomas De Quincey’s opium use as a product of social strain. De Quincey’s collection of work provides evidence that he felt alienated from society prior to his addiction and that his feelings of inadequacy contributed to his dependence on drugs. Utilizing Robert K. Merton’s strain theory, this thesis delineates De Quincey’s aspirational references and perceived failures through an examination of his imagery and interprets his perceptions of human life as a catalyst for his compulsions to cope with opium. De Quincey, strained by the aspirations of an industrial and imperialistic society, looked for several avenues of escape. The Romanticism of William Wordsworth presented De Quincey with a method for alleviating social strain; however, when De Quincey failed to discover the transcendence evident in Lyrical Ballads he turned to the intoxicating effects of opium and retreated from English society.

In critical discourse surrounding the poetry of William Wordsworth, it has become generally acceptable to describe the course of the poet’s career by means of a theory of “decline.” In its most common form, this theory argues that Wordsworth’s best poetry was written during one “Great Decade” (1798-1807)—an isolated epoch of prolificacy and genius. His subsequent works, it is argued, neither surpass nor equal his initial efforts; the course of his career after 1808 may be best described in terms of declivity, ebb, and decline. Due to its ideological complicity with the very texts it engages, and due to its construction as a “myth” of criticism, the theory of decline ultimately becomes a reductive premise that precludes understanding Wordsworth’s apparent downtrend as a complex but explicable process. This study therefore seeks to provide a critical explanation for the process of decline so often observed in Wordsworth’s poetry. In essence, I contend that the perceptible downtrend in Wordsworth’s verse is the direct consequence of continuous, career-long processes of revision or self-editing. This self-editing took two forms: First, the explicit form, whereby Wordsworth actually emended his poetry; and second, the implicit form, whereby Wordsworth sought, through his poetry, to amend his self-image by constructing an autobiography tailored to fit an idealized poetic identity. This analysis thus reveals and explicates Wordsworth’s possible motives for revision—the fluctuating demands made upon the poet by the poet himself. Because these demands represent the operative (if unstable) principle underlying specific textual changes, one may infer from their character the reasons why Wordsworth’s later poetry suffers in revision. By attending to the process whereby earlier verse was continually revised in order to fit a conceptual or poetic context for which it was not originally intended, I demonstrate how the actual substance of Wordsworth’s poetry was compromised or attenuated through a reductive (re)appropriation of its own materials. Unlike many critics, I do not treat Wordsworth’s revisions as the signifiers of some external change. Instead, my approach keys upon the conflict between Wordsworth’s efforts to realize a stable poetic identity and the representational and rhetorical limitations of poetic form, particularly with regards to autobiography. Drawing on the work of Susan Wolfson, Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom, I argue that Wordsworth’s revisionary practices are motivated by an agonistic process best described as “autobiographical anxiety” or the “‘anxiety of influence’ turned inward.” Ultimately, I conclude that Wordsworth’s decline was the consequence of an overarching ethic of composition which, because it privileged revision as a means of changing not only poetry but the poet himself, allowed self-consciousness to become a self-defeating agent.

La presente investigación parte de dos postulados básicos: primero, la rotunda dimensión cognitiva que cabe asignar al arte; y segundo, la primacía del discurso y la experiencia estéticos frente a los modos epistémicos que dislocan conciencia y realidad por medio de múltiples dicotomías. Nuestro ámbito principal de indagación es la obra del poeta romántico William Wordsworth. Haremos especial hincapié en su producción desde 1797 hasta 1805, o sea, el período en que se perfiló el proyecto filosófico-poético cuyo impulso central es inseparable del movimiento romántico, ya que está vertebrado por los mencionados postulados sobre el valor cognitivo de lo estético y su preponderancia sobre discursos concurrentes.Así pues, el objetivo de este trabajo persigue elaborar la estructura implícita de ideas que subyace a los postulados antes mencionados y, con ello, determinar sobre qué fundamento es posible encontrar en lo estético una primacía epistemológica como la que Wordsworth y el movimiento romántico en general sostienen como piedra de toque de sus teorías. Para el despliegue de esta investigación hemos planteamos una serie de preguntas que han guiado el desarrollo general de la tesis. Nuestra estructura se ha desplegado alrededor de cuatro cuestiones principales: ¿en qué consiste la visión que otorgan el arte y el modelo de experiencia estética?; ¿en qué sentido la actitud estética deviene agente de esta verdad viva, más amplia, radical y completa?; ¿cómo se operan la comprensión y la asimilación de los modelos cognitivos reductivos de la tradición desde este nuevo modelo?; y también, como reflexión final, ¿se le otorga a la filosofía, en su sentido tradicional, un papel respecto a ello, o por el contrario se le exige una remodelación de raíz en sus modos y sus hábitos más sedimentados?A través de estas cuestiones y el análisis de los conceptos centrales del romanticismo de Wordsworth como 'imaginación', 'naturaleza', 'poesía', etc., hemos pretendido una explicitación de un modelo cognitivo radical y completo: el modelo estético del conocimiento y del saber. Este modelo asume el carácter no problemático de nuestra participación en los procesos de conocimiento y de realidad, y se estructurará alrededor de cuatro ejes centrales: percepción extensiva, significados abiertos, dinámicos e inagotables, la asunción plena de la lógica de la polaridad, y el postulado de un sustrato primordial, de una fuente o campo indiferenciado del aparecer, inherente a lo aparecido mismo y accesible por un ejercicio de agudeza perceptiva. El análisis de las nociones 'Imaginación' y 'Naturaleza' en Wordsworth nos llevará a la conclusión de su indiferenciación última, puesto que ambas apuntarán en su significa pleno y más amplio a esta realidad original entendida como apertura, como un campo integrado y unificado inherente a los fenómenos, a los cuales anima, realiza y disuelve en un juego interminable de encuentros e interrelaciones, de reciprocidades que disuelven los límites taxativos entre sensaciones, cosas e ideas. / This thesis is based on two fundamental premises: first, the deep cognitive dimension attributable to art; and second, the primacy of discourse and aesthetic experience over epistemological modes which dislocate awareness and reality through multiple dichotomies. Our principal line of inquiry is the work of the poet William Wordsworth. We shall pay special attention to his output from 1797 to 1805, that is, the period in which he outlined his philosophical-poetic project, the main thrust of which is inseparable from the Romantic movement.Thus, our aim is to construct the implicit structure of ideas underpinning the above mentioned beliefs and, through this, to determine on what basis it is possible to find an epistemological primacy, such as Wordsworth, and the Romantics in general, maintained was the touchstone of their theories, in the aesthetic. The research has been carried out employing a set of questions to guide the general development of the thesis and has been structured around four main questions: Of what does the vision provided by art and the model of aesthetic experience consist? In what sense does the aesthetic stance work as an agent of this broader, radical and complete living truth? How does the comprehension and assimilation of reductive, cognitive models of tradition work within this new model? Finally: is philosophy, in the traditional sense, given a role with respect to that new model, or on the contrary, does it demand a root and branch remodelling of philosophy's most settled modes and habits?Through these questions and the analysis of the central concepts of Wordsworth's Romanticism as "imagination", "nature" or "poetry", we shall try to form an explicit statement of a radical and complete cognitive model: an aesthetic model of knowledge and knowing. This model assumes our uncomplicated participation in the processes of knowledge and reality, and will be structured around four key concepts: extensive perception; open, dynamic and inexhaustible meanings; the full assumption of the logic of polarity; and the suggestion of a primordial substrate, of a source or an undifferentiated field of appearance inherent in what appears and accessible by exercising acute perception.

This dissertation is a study of the romantic elements in Bernard Malamud's fiction that can be seen as representing a romantic ideology closely related to the romanticism of William Wordsworth.

This dissertation examines the role of sibling kinship in shaping the poetry, drama, and fiction of English Romanticism (1789-1832). While critics have long associated Romanticism with a myth of solitary authorship and an archetype of isolated genius, I demonstrate that Romantic authors imagined subjectivity in the plural, curating a vision of identity-formation that is collective, shared, multiple, and relational. Embodied in the portrayal of sibling relationships, this inter-subjective paradigm delivers new frameworks for understanding the Romantic self as situated within networks of others—networks of those who are not quite the same yet not quite different; those who are both familiar and yet unknown. My study is the first to present a sustained consideration of the way Romantic writers invoked literary siblinghood as a model for the collaborative and collective nature of selfhood, and I propose that this focus on lateral sibling kinship offers alternatives to the conventional reproductive lenses through which the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century family has been previously understood. Drawing from recent work in feminist and queer theory, psychology and psychoanalysis, and sociocultural histories of kinship, this dissertation contributes new readings of canonical texts by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Joanna Baillie, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley. Chapter One considers two stage dramas by P. B. Shelley and Baillie as rewritings of Sophocles’s Antigone. In both plays, sisters use their fraternal-sororal relations to redefine familial systems of reproduction via horizontal means of transmission rather than through vertical lines of biological inheritance. In Chapter Two, I extend this discussion of sibling networks to Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, where, I suggest, we find trans-subjective inter-relations that define the poet’s vision well beyond autobiographical references to his sister Dorothy. Austen’s novels serve as the focus of Chapter Three, which argues that the self-contained “I” of the Bildungsroman genre, as Austen incorporates it, in fact depends upon intimate epistemological exchanges between sororal characters who undergo a mutually influential process of development. Chapter Four concludes with a discussion of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I suggest that the author critiques her central male protagonist for his failures to recognize how the reciprocity of male-female sibling sympathies underlies homosocial bonds. Taken together, these readings advance a version of Romantic subjectivity based upon lateral integration rather than egotistical solipsism. / 2027-02-28T00:00:00Z

Victorian scholar William Knight remains one of the most prolific Wordsworth scholars of the nineteenth century. His many publications helped establish Wordsworth's positive Victorian reputation that twentieth and twenty-first century scholars inherited. My particular focus is how Knight's 1889 inclusion of "Home at Grasmere" in his Life of William Wordsworth, rather than in his chronological sequencing of the poems, establishes a way to read the poem as a biographical artifact for his late-Victorian audience. Knight's detailed account of the poet's life, often told through letters and journal accounts, provides more contexts-including Dorothy's journal entries and correspondence of the early 1800s-to understand the poem than MacMillan's 1888 stand-alone edition of the poem (whose pre-emptive publication caused a small debate in 1888-89). Knight presents "Home at Grasmere" as a document of Wordsworth's personal experience and development as grounded in the Lake District. Analyzing the ways Knight's editorial decisions-both for his biography as a whole and his placement of "Home at Grasmere" within it-shape the initial reception of "Home at Grasmere" allows me to enrich the conversation about Wordsworth and the Victorian Age. Currently scholarship connecting Knight and Wordsworth remains sparser than other areas of Wordsworth commentary. However, several scholars have explored the connections between the two, and I augment their arguments by showing how Knight's invention of the poem creates an essential part of the "Home at Grasmere" archive-a term Jacques Derrida uses to describe a place or idea that houses important artifacts and determines the power of the knowledge it preserves. I argue this by showing that Knight's editorial decisions embody the characteristics of an archon-keeper or preserver of archival material-as he creates the way to read the poem as a biographical artifact while also responding to Wordsworth's own beliefs about the poetry and biographical theory. Knight's archival contribution allows Victorians to view the poem as a product of Wordsworth's developing poetic genius and helps establish Wordsworth as the great Romantic poet.

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