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

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Dorothy Wordsworth’s religious practices continued to evolve throughout her life. She was baptized Anglican, but after her mother’s death she resided with her mother’s cousin, where she practiced Unitarianism. When she later moved in with her uncle, she embraced evangelical Anglicanism. Records of her religious beliefs in her twenties are scarce, as after moving to Racedown with her brother William in 1795 and throughout her years living in Alfoxden, she rarely wrote of her involvement with organized religion. Only in the 1810s while at Grasmere did Dorothy Wordsworth begin to record a gradual return to church attendance. Concerning her religious practices in the years following this return, due to a relative lack of information concerning Dorothy Wordsworth’s spirituality during this period, scholars have concluded that her Anglicanism was unremarkable: groundbreaking biographer Ernest De Sélincourt called her faith a “simple orthodox piety” (267) while Robert Gittings and Jo Manton labeled it “the conventional piety of her middle age” (168). Often, scholars have also concluded that Dorothy Wordsworth’s Anglicanism was relatively orthodox, due to the outspoken High Churchmanship of her brothers William and Christopher. As this thesis demonstrates, however, Dorothy Wordsworth’s previously unpublished Rydal Journals complicate such conclusions. These journals offer a wealth of evidence concerning her religious practices and beliefs between 1825–35, including extensive lists of scripture references, records of her church attendance, logs of her religious reading, assessments of sermons, and expressions of her personal faith. The various findings suggest that Dorothy’s faith was more complex than previously understood, as it was passionate, informed, and, in ways, surprisingly evangelical.

The purpose of this thesis is to discuss Wordsworth's evolving nature project, particularly during the Regency, when his sonnet collection The River Duddon offered an alternative view of nature to that found in the works of Byron and Shelley. This thesis argues that The River Duddon deserves renewed critical attention not only because of the acclaim it received at its publication in 1820, but also because it marks yet another turn in Wordsworth's evolving nature project, and one that comes in opposition to the depiction of nature given during the Regency by Byron, and Shelley. Wordsworth's portrayal of nature dramatically changed throughout his lifetime. The first chapter deals with the poet's shifting notions of nature up until 1810. Most of the poems discussed here come from Lyrical Ballads, the key collection of Wordsworth's early years. In particular, I suggest that "Tintern Abbey" can be read as a hypothesis wherein Wordsworth reconciles the doubt regarding nature he expressed in earlier poems such as "The Female Vagrant" and "The Thorn." While Wordsworth continued to express doubt in poems such as "Two April Mornings," "The Fountain," and "Michael," he expressed an appreciation for nature in relation to God in "Ode: Intimations on Immortality." On the eve of the Regency, however, he returned to doubting nature's benevolence in "Peele Castle." The second chapter deals with the Regency, looking at the development of Wordsworth's reputation and the emergence of Byron and Shelley's so-called "Satanic School" of poetry. Wordsworth's career during this time was marked by mixed criticism, as evidenced by The Excursion and Peter Bell. At this same time, his Romantic philosophies of nature were being challenged by the more liberal views set forth by Byron and Shelley. This chapter looks specifically at Byron's Don Juan and "Darkness" and Shelley's Alastor and "Mont Blanc" in order to contrast Wordsworth's nature project with that of the "Satanic School." My final chapter turns to Wordsworth's final Regency-era publication, The River Duddon. Here I argue that, while this is one of the poet's lesser-known works, The River Duddon marks a significant new phase in the Romantic conversation concerning nature and is thus worthy of more extensive study. Not only does this poem portray a more confident trust in nature than previously seen in Lyrical Ballads, but it also serves to juxtapose the depiction of nature presented by the "Satanic School" during the Regency. To highlight differences between the projects of Wordsworth and the "Satanic School," I conclude with a comparison of The River Duddon with Byron's "Darkness" and Shelley's "Mont Blanc."

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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The English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850) – considered by many to be one of the foremost poets of the English language alongside Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton – is an important name in the history of modern poetry. Together with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) and Robert Southey (1774-1843) he was known during his lifetime as one of the ‘Lake Poets’, who chose to live and work not in the bustling city of London but in the ‘sublime’ countryside of the Lake District in England’s north western corner. Their poetry – and especially that of Wordsworth – sought to capture the ‘Splendour and Beauty’ (Ode.—1820) of nature and to give it fresh, luminous expression. They sought to recover ‘The vision and the faculty divine’, as Wordsworth called it (The Excursion, I. 79), which is the natural way of perceiving the world for the child but – in Milton’s elegiac words – a ‘Paradise lost’ for man. This study has had two main objectives: (I) to analyse Wordsworth’s poems My Heart Leaps Up and Ode: Intimations from a Christian theological perspective, and (II) to discuss the implications of this analysis on the understanding of the metaphor of the child in the New Testament. The theoretical starting point for the investigation has been that poetry has ‘a special ability to expose different (also contradictory) perspectives and meanings since it is (often) characterised by puzzling paradoxes, suggestive symbols, provocative voids and other stylistic figures’ (Maria Essunger) and that Wordsworth is a ‘Philosophical Poet’ – a thesis well established in the literature. The results of the study show that the metaphor of the child is theologically rich in meaning – it can be understood from an ontological, a Christological, a Trinitarian and a soteriological perspective – and philosophically complex in nature, and that it therefore requires careful consideration in order not to be deprived of its spiritual, metaphorical significance. ‘For the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life’ (2 Cor. 3.6).

William Wordsworth was not the civic-minded public servant who is often thought of when good citizenship awards are given. However, it can be said that through his writings, he did much to arouse others to an awareness of political, religious, and educational needs of his country. This thesis examines his views in these areas and how they contributed to him as a citizen.

This thesis discusses the influence of Milton on the poetry of Wordsworth.