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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / Literary movements, in one way or another, have influenced music throughout the history of art. The interaction between these two forms of art, however, is nowhere so prominent in the history of music as in Germany durinq the years, 1800-1850, the so-called "golden age" of Romantic music. Indeed, German Romantic literature and German Romantic music were so closely interwoven during this period that it is difficult to separate one from the other. In truth, a new literary-musical art had developed in Germany during the first half of the nineteenth century. The synthesis between German Romantic music and German Romantic literature has been appreciated more by literary scholars than by scholars of music. George C. Schoolfield's The Figure of the Musician in German Literature (The University of North Carolina Press, 1956) is, for example, a significant study. In music, however, there is no one work which deals adequately, to my knowledge, with the interaction between these two arts. Even in articles relating to the subject two prominent figures have been neglected, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck. It is due to the belief that German Romantic music cannot be fully understood without a knowledge of German Romantic literature and their interrelationships that this study was undertaken. The dissertation concentrates on the six German Romantic writers who have exerted the qreatest influence on German Romantic music: Wackenroder, Tieck, Navalis, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Heinrich Heine, and Jean Paul Richter. The first chapter deals with two works by Goethe, Wilhelm Meister and Faust. Other Romantic writers, such as Marike and Eichendorff, have also been included whenever a comparison was possible [TRUNCATED]. / 2031-01-01

This dissertation examines the Hunt circle's public activities and its historical significance in terms of public-sphere theory proposed by Jurgen Harbermas. Recent studies on Romantic literature have attended to how Romantic writers' literary practices were conditioned upon their contemporary history, as opposed to the traditional notion of Romanticism based on an affirmation of individual creativity. Although these studies meaningfully highlight the historicity inherent in seemingly individualistic Romantic texts, they have frequently failed to assess the way in which this historicity of Romantic texts is connected to Romantic writers' own will to engage with public issues by placing too much emphasis on how history determines individuals' activities. In this sense, the notion of public sphere offers a productive theoretical framework by which to read the historicity of Romantic literature without disavowing an individual writer's role in historical proceedings, since it underscores a historical process in which a communal interaction between individuals constitutes a progress of history. By focusing on this significance of public-sphere theory, this dissertation suggests that the Hunt circle, whose members' communal literary practices were aimed at achieving the public good in the tumultuous post-Napoleonic era, serves as a model of this process-based historical theorization. Chapter I examines the significance of public-sphere theory in assessing how the Hunt circle engaged in its contemporary history. Chapter II elucidates the nature of the public sphere that Leigh Hunt's and his circle's activities created and discusses the problems that this public sphere faced in the historical context of the early nineteenth century. Chapter III shows how the Hunt circle exposed a sense of anxiety and instability in the face of the commercialized literary public sphere by examining John Keats's literary practices. Chapter IV highlights Percy Bysshe Shelley's public ideal which aimed for a unified and inclusive public sphere beyond class boundaries and traces how this ideal was frustrated in the ensuing historical proceedings. Chapter V deals with the final phase of the Hunt circle and its disintegration by observing the ways in which Mary Shelley memorialized the Hunt circle for the feminized reading public of the Victorian period. By illuminating the nature of the Hunt circle's activities for the public, this dissertation ultimately aims to reassess how literary intellectuals in the Romantic period struggled to sustain the traditional calling of men of letters in their contemporary public sphere.

Although the sensational world of Gothic literature may seem to have little to do with the “dismal science” of economics, readers and critics have long recognized connections between Romantic-era political economic discourse and Gothic novels, from the trope of the haunted castle on contested property to Adam Smith’s metaphor of the spectral “invisible hand.” This study, the first sustained investigation of economics and the Gothic, reads Romantic Gothic literature as an important voice in public debates about the economic ideas that shaped the emerging phenomenon of commercial society. Drawing on Charles Taylor’s notion of the modern social imaginary, it argues that the ways in which Gothic literature interrogated these ideas continues to inform our understanding of the economy and our place within it today. Each chapter focuses on an economic idea, including property, coverture, credit, debt, and consumption, in relation to a selection of representative Gothic texts, from Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1848). It analyzes these texts—primarily novels, but also short fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—in the context of political economic writings by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and others. Through this analysis, this study argues that economic ideas are foundational to the Gothic, a mode of literature deeply engaged with the political, cultural, social, and economic upheavals that characterize the Romantic Age. / Graduate / 2021-05-14

Hawthorne is one among the few American writers who have dwelt on the subject of the creative process throughout his works. Through introspection and then skillfully enumerating the necessary elements of artistry, Hawthorne educated his audience in the progression of creating a piece of work. Many changes have taken place in literature since Hawthorne's time, but the basic principles set forth in his theories still hold true. Hawthorne's theories of art and his analysis of the creative process are surely among his most important contributions to literature. In the absence of a long national literary history, he mingled the Actual with the Imaginary and adapted his work to a form of the novel called Romance. With materials he could find concerning the short history of his country, he showed how past events influence the present. He examined the creative process that took place in his own work and shared with posterity the conditions under which he created.

This study provides a new account of the evolution of the eighteenth-century British novel by reading it as a response to contemporary interest in, and self-consciousness about, print communication. During the eighteenth century, print went from being a marginal technology to being one with an increasingly wide circulation and a diverse range of applications. The pervasive adoption of print generated anxiety about its positive and negative effects, prompting a series of responses from writers. Examining the work of five British novelists from across the long eighteenth century, this dissertation investigates the influence of eighteenth-century philosophical thinking about human understanding and social interaction on the assumptions that these novelists made about the way their work would be received. In particular, this thesis explores the ways in which these novelists respond to contemporary philosophical ideas about the cognitive functions of the imagination by experimenting with the form of their work in order to generate new kinds of reception. But this study also shows that, while these five novelists drew on the tenets of eighteenth-century moral philosophy, their work exposed a number of the limitations of that philosophy by putting it into practice. Each chapter in this study focuses on a different aspect of the intersection of mediation and imagination. Chapter One considers the ways in which Locke's understanding of probability informed Richardson's attempts to promote specific affective reading practices with his epistolary fictions and editorial commentary. Chapter Two reads Sterne's manipulations of the material page in Tristram Shandy as an attempt to expose the limitations of print communication and to suggest new ways of reading that could overcome those limitations. Chapter Three examines the writing of Smith, Kames, Mackenzie, Reeve and Godwin in order to illustrate both the promise and the danger that these authors attribute to imaginative sympathy and to the reading practices that promote sympathetic reactions. Chapter Four explores Scott's experiments with a form of fiction that could collapse the distance between writing and orality in order to force readers to reevaluate the complex relationship of sound and writing in the establishment of communities in an age of print.