Date of Award

1-1-2013

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of English

Content Description

1 online resource (vi, 210 pages)

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Richard Barney

Committee Members

Helen Elam, Kir Kuiken, David Wills

Keywords

Body, Imagination, Materialization, Romanticism, Subjectivity, Mind and body, Materialism

Subject Categories

English Language and Literature

Abstract

“The Multiplied Body: Romanticism's Imaginary Subject” develops a new understanding of the Romantic subject as one that fundamentally disrupts the formation of the poetic “I” in its demonstration that through the “awful power” of the imagination the Romantic body is always, already multiplied. The texts analyzed (both Romantic and contemporary) recognize the “constitutive” social and historical fallacies surrounding definitions of the “natural” human. This project's development of an imagined multiple body denotes a refutation of humanistic theories about embodied existence. Ultimately, through an analysis of poetry by Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley (among others), “The Multiplied Body” reveals alternative ontological strategies of knowing that question assumptions about subjectivity and its relationship to materialization.

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