Shaking the whole system of things : catastrophe and continuity in romantic narrative
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation reconsiders the relationship between literature and conceptions of historical time in the Romantic period, arguing that many of British Romanticism's most significant literary innovations developed as responses to pervasive cultural anxieties about the relationship between past and present. As critics from Georg Lukàcs to James Chandler have argued, Europe in the early decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of the "historicist" worldview, according to which individual and collective subjects see themselves as existing both in and as history (rather than as embodiments of a timeless, universal human nature or nodes in a divinely-ordered system). If the seemingly never-ending cycles of revolution and war that engulfed Britain and Continental Europe after 1789 contributed to historicism's development and diffusion by making history a matter of concern for everyone, they also created a widespread and unsettling sense of rupture and disconnection—between thoughts and feelings, individuals and collectives, and, most importantly, past and present. Taking three major works of Romantic literature as case studies, I explore literary responses to this sense of rupture as they are articulated in relation to the two poles I call "catastrophe" (i.e. a radical break between one historical moment and the next) and continuity (i.e. a smooth flow or even identity between historical moments). Published within a few years of each other, Walter Scott's Waverley, or 'Tis Sixty Years Since (1814), Jane Austen's Persuasion (1817), and Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-18) represent some of Romanticism's most influential contributions to British literature, including the new genre of the historical novel, the Byronic hero and his quest, and the rapid advance of realism in fiction. The chronological proximity of these three works, I argue, reveals a cultural moment in which historicism had not yet congealed into a secure, dominant structure of thinking and feeling. All three depict the past/present relationship as either extreme (i.e. excessively catastrophic or excessively continuous) or paradoxical (i.e. catastrophically continuous); all three, likewise, remake established formal, generic, thematic, and stylistic models in order to capture and communicate these unfamiliar varieties of temporal experience. The very ambivalence of these texts provides them with a degree of reflective distance on the broader culture of Romantic historicism. As I demonstrate across my three chapters, Scott, Byron, and Austen offer, in their own unique ways, profound meditations not only on historicism's fundamental concepts and categories, but also on the very nature and significance of history itself, on the human experience and consciousness of time, and on the role of memory in individual and collective life.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2018; ©2018 |
| Publication date | 2018; 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Llewellyn, Tanya Simone |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Bender, John B |
| Degree supervisor | Woloch, Alex, 1970- |
| Thesis advisor | Bender, John B |
| Thesis advisor | Woloch, Alex, 1970- |
| Thesis advisor | Duncan, Ian, 1955- |
| Degree committee member | Duncan, Ian, 1955- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, English Department. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Tanya Llewellyn. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the English Department. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2018. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by Tanya Simone Llewellyn
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...