This thesis argues that in the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius Shelley found an insight into the role of contingency in physical and historical process which allowed him to go beyond the limitations of an intellectual inheritance divided between post-Kantian Romanticism and the sceptical revolutionary Enlightenment. This insight entails radical implications for our understanding of the political role of the literary text. Shelley conceives society in evolutionary terms, making poetry a revolutionary clinamen (or mutation) in the iterative cycles of social reproduction. Models drawn from contemporary chaos theory help us to understand how this entropic tendency to disorder can work simultaneously as a negentropic motor of social innovation. Building on the work of Michel Serres, who demonstrates that Lucretius anticipates the recent scientific interest in "determinate indeterminacy," this thesis shows that Shelley's understanding of historical process and the role of the poet in social reproduction has anticipated some of the implications of contemporary "chaos science" in ways that suggest models for the general application of this new paradigm of contemporary scientific thought to literary and political issues.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.28525 |
| Date | January 1994 |
| Creators | Roberts, Hugh |
| Contributors | Heppner, Christopher (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001425938, proquestno: NN00132, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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