This dissertation reconsiders sacred tropes in the Romantic poetry of William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, and John Keats within the context of ascetic performances and written saints’ lives. I argue that reading these poets as ascetic figures helps us to better understand Romantic isolation as a deeply social engagement, for an ascetic rejects his social milieu in order to call for the sanctification of a corrupt community. Asceticism redraws the lines of Romantic immanent critique of nineteenth-century England and newly explains the ghostly afterlives of poets whose literary personae transcend their biographical lives. Furthermore, this study takes up the ways in which the foundational ascetic tropes of Romantic poetry bind the major poets together in an impenetrable canon of writers with holy vows to poetry and to each other. My readings examine different kinds of ascetic vocation at play in the work of each poet, and I ultimately argue that this traditional support for the Romantic canon demands that we reconsider our critical attachments to Romanticism as the beginning of a secular literary tradition.

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M.A. (English) / John Keats (31 October.1795 - 23 February 1821) is prominent among the younger generation of poets of the Romantic period. From the early admiration of his contemporaries to the present much attention has been paid to the nature of Romanticism in his work. A member of the "Keats circle," Joseph Ritchie, as early as November 1817 wrote to a friend that he thought Keats "might well prove to be the great poetical luminary of the age to come."l In an essay entitled "On the Development of Keats' (sic) Reputation," (1968), J. R. MacGillivray discusses this ongoing admiration of Keats as central to the embodiment of . Romanticism, and refers also to the veneration of the poet by members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 2 MacGillivray states that they had a natural affinity for the poet's work because of the "romantic medievalism" in some of his poems, and because of the sensuous richness of some of his description...

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1932 R61

My thesis depicts the crisis of self-legitimation that has accompanied the onset of modern hermeneutics, with its historicised and organicised version of the Enlightenment's 'universal perspective.' In this it follows the lead of the contemporary hermeneuticist Hans- Georg Gadamer in resuscitating the notion of prejudice, but contrasts it with Hannah Arendt's discussion of the human condition. She implicitly locates the problem in modern hermeneutics, the aporia, in the very philosophy of life that Gadamer embraces as its solution. Gadamer confuses the task of the humanities as a search for truth with what it ought to be, a search for meaning. I begin with his depiction of Kant's attack on the sensus communis; I conclude with an examination of the consequences of this attack on the orientation and interpretative practices of current schools of literary criticism with specific reference to Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn. In the central chapter, I focus upon Coleridge's attack on Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802) in the Bioeraphia Literaria, reading it as a fundamental defence of prejudice based on the very fact that man has been made in imago Dei. The consequent logocentricity of humanity that Coleridge insists upon opposes Wordsworth's emphasis upon a transcendental idea of 'feeling.' This fundamental notion forms the basis of Coleridge's definition of the primary imagination. I argue the distinctiveness of his definition from that of the other Romantics and maintain its necessity to escape the aporia. This point is proved negatively by Shelley's Mont Blanc, which seizes upon the radical consequences of Wordsworth's poetics, presenting both heresy and obscurity in the poem. The word 'crisis' thus reflects the urgency with which I advocate the need to re-adopt Coleridge's emphases in contemporary literary criticism.

Magisterarbeit--Frankfurt am Main--Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität, 1995. / Bibliogr. p. 135-141.

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Thesis (M.A.)--Villanova University, 2008. / English Dept. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1991.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1991. / Also available in print.