In this dissertation, I conceive of three interlocking developments in geography: the revolution of infrastructure, the circulation of goods and print, and the completion of the map of the world. The enclosure of lands and the construction of turnpikes and canals not only broadened opportunities for travel and navigation but also accelerated the dissemination of commodities of all sorts. I argue that these geographical developments expanded, sometimes beyond the point of recognition, familiar notions of place that were framed by a parish or estate or even a metropolis. The connection between familiar locales and vastly expanded zones of travel and voyaging became increasingly tenuous. Centrality as an idea was threatened by the reach and complexity of this new Britain and the new New world. Through successive waves of expansion each more extensive and pervasive than the previous the relationship between the center and the periphery was radically altered. The ownership of the eye from a fixed, central place was, then, not adequate or sufficient for describing the experience of movement. The impact on literature was correspondingly great. The traveling poem, literature of the road, the grand tour, poems of place, and the lyrical ballad undermined the authority of a stable prospect, displacing it into a stereographic projection of multiple, mobile, and provisional points of view.
My first chapter on Anne Finch discusses Eastwell Park as a local center in transition. Finchs withdrawal from the Court into the country was for her a loss of power and influence, but she compensated for it by writing landscape poetry, which was a significant departure from rural idealization. In my second chapter, Robinson Crusoes flight from the New world breaks the archetype of the merchant adventurer by setting it in an island whose subtleties reflected in the great-thoroughfare of the settlers brain. In chapter 3, I treat Joseph Banks as another failed archetype, this time of a Linnaean taxonomist. Banks brought data and specimens home from the South Seas in order to place them into classes and genera, but this plan was foiled by the singularity of his experiences there. Banks became a hybrid figure, the grand tourist turned into a native, a scientist turned into a collector of curiosities. In chapter 4, I discuss georgic and topographical poetry as a literary development indissolubly linked with the systole and diastole of world-wide traffic. John Drydens London, John Dyers trans-Severn Siluria as well as William Wordsworths Blackcomb are the specific poetic locales enveloped by an ever more complex sense of the world. In my final chapter, I turn the argument of the dissertation to Wordsworth as chief inheritor of this real geographic revolution. In writing Salisbury Plain, Wordsworth sought for a poetic law of movement that would simulate this revolution in the material world. Wordsworths ceaseless movement as a traveler transformed the region of Salisbury into a sea, and he sailed on a gypsy caravan into the island of Stonehenge, an uncanny place that combined personal alienation and cultural dislocation in 1793. My critical perspective has been developed in a framework of recent thinkers, such as Michel Serres, Kevin Hetherington, Bruno Latour, and Alain Badiou. A fresh, original theme in their work is what I call trajectivity - the rhythmic tracing and retracing of fluid lines of connection between events and situations. My dissertation claims that the materiality of this geographic trajectory now took place in literary imaginings of their own global network and thus constituted a new geographical condition of superposing post-colonial literary empire on British imperialism.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-12052007-163037 |
| Date | 27 December 2007 |
| Creators | Kim, Jeongoh |
| Contributors | James Epstein, Bridget Orr, Mark Schoenfield, Jonathan Lamb |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-12052007-163037/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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