This dissertation investigates the historical and present relationship of didactic poetry to the political thought of radical communities. Poetry from the Romantic period to the present is often seen as the valence of lyric and personal registers of thought, and its political utility is typically equated with the extent to which it resists concreti...
This thesis contends that scale is Romantic, and Romanticism is scalar. Defined as a ‘difference in size that makes a difference’ (after Gregory Bateson), scale is both real and discursive, and can be understood as an aspect of the historical, economic, and intellectual transformations in relation to which Romanticism has historically been theorise...
In An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, the philosopher and novelist William Godwin raises the concern that the earth may one day “be in danger of becoming too populous,” a cataclysm for which “a remedy may then be necessary.” What this remedy will be, however, Godwin does not know. “Who can say,” he writes, “what remedies shall suggest themsel...
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This dissertation proposes what I am calling a zero ecology. Through a reading of four British Romantic poets—John Clare, William Wordsworth, William Blake, and Charlotte Smith—I argue that these writers refuse to permanently fix personhood, poetry, or place as the irrevocable center in a field, but instead temporarily locate each in a “vanishing p...
Rethinking the Arts and Sciences recovers a crucial and yet neglected history of Romantic involvement with the urban institutional infrastructures of their time. The project draws on research in urban Romanticism and Romantic sociability to intervene in the entrenched view that British Romanticism was a largely rural, individual endeavor, opposed t...
This paper analyses the drama Ferdinand the Seventh; or, A Dramatic Sketch of the Recent Revolution in Spain. Published in London in 1823, this play explores the reactions to the coup led by Rafael de Riego in the court of Ferdinand VII. The author clearly supports the liberal cause and portrays the King as a weak and changeable individual, who fir...
This paper examines “Don Juan; or the Battle of Tolosa”, an anonymous poem published inLondonin 1816. This metrical tale set in medievalIberiaat the time of the so-called “reconquista” recreates the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212), in which the Muslim forces were defeated by a Christian coalition near Sierra Morena. The poet clearly sides with...
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