Romantic characters, Victorian plots: Lyric and the genealogy of British domestic realism

Kenneth C Crowell, Purdue University

Abstract

This dissertation considers the explicit relation of poetic form to the rise of the novel and to the concomitant development of British conceptions of character interiority in the nineteenth century. My project is unique in its interdisciplinary approach in that it looks to Romantic poetry to uncover poetry’s place in the genealogy of Victorian realist character. No study as yet has suggested that prose realism’s formal maneuvers and the Victorian conceptions of self these maneuvers reflect and remake can be traced to Romantic lyric innovations and are inflected by the direct challenge Victorian lyric posed to realism’s market dominance. Yet the barriers between poetry and the novel and between romance and realism during the century were highly permeable; the market threat of the novel and its penchant for expansive, diffuse material description challenged and were challenged by the Victorian lyric, while the Romantic, lyric understanding of transcendent deep selves and truths played an insufficiently acknowledged role in the development of the character-driven Victorian realism so central to the British domestic imagination. This study traces the rise of realism and the decline of lyricism as both grapple with their Romantic heritage and grapple with Victorian Britain’s reconceptualization of psychological interiority. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.)

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Felluga, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Romance literature|Literature|British and Irish literature

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