Sherrill, Matthew Robert (Author)
Williams, Carolyn D. (Advisor)
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick
Williams, Carolyn D.
Physical Details: 189 pp.
Language: English
This dissertation seeks to reorient the discussion of evolutionary science and literature in the British long nineteenth century towards a consideration of poetic form. Unlike critical considerations of the nineteenth-century novel, in which questions of form and evolution have long been intertwined, studies of the period's poetry have struggled to convincingly link developments and experiments in poetic form to the evolutionary milieu in which they took place. Where critics do discuss nineteenth-century poetry and evolution, it is in the context of an intellectual-historical approach that regards form as an afterthought. In recent years, although critics have moved towards regarding poetic form as enmeshed in political and economic formations, they have still ignored the ways in which poetic forms serve as indices for scientific models or theories. This dissertation attempts to fill that gap by asking questions about what happens when one adopts a reading practice equally alert to both form and scientific history. My fundamental contention is that a willingness to think formally about poetry while remaining observant to developments in evolutionary science can unearth an alternative cultural history, in which poets serve less as direct conduits for symptomatic evolutionary anxiety or enthusiasm, and more as active participants in scientific dialogue. This formal history illuminates the degree to which non-Darwinian models of evolutionary theory have been obscured in much poetic criticism, but also highlights the misunderstandings and confusion which characterized many poets' encounters with developmental models of natural history, a confusion that registers through formal experimentation. In other words, my study aims to shed light not only on our understanding of formal innovation in nineteenth century verse through a scientific lens, but also the history of the uneven reception of that science through an attention to poetic form. The first chapter tracks the dynamic relationship between text and paratext in Erasmus Darwin's didactic epics, the second examines repetition and repurposing in the verse of Charlotte Smith's children's books, the third attends to perspectival experiments of Robert Browning's monologues, and the fourth is focused on the rethinking of temporality in George Meredith's sonnet sequence, Modern Love. Through this apparently motley assemblage of figures, I hope to track an unobserved history of evolutionary reception through form in a manner that encourages poetic readings that regard form and science as vividly and necessarily entangled.
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