Dissertation

Working title: Post-Romantic Aesthetics in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry

My thesis examines responses to and dialogues with Romanticism in British and Irish poetry since 1980. The project focuses on a selection of poets, most of whom hail from the ‘Celtic’ regions Scotland, Wales and Ireland, whose works foreground questions of marginality in relation to ecological, regional and gendered constructions of subjectivity and alterity (e.g. Gillian Clarke, Eavan Boland, Kathleen Jamie, John Burnside, Alice Oswald). In contrast to the more radical formal experiments of 20th century avant-garde poetries, this kind of ‘poetry with a cause’ (Müller-Zettelmann) presents poetic language as a means of authentic emotional and political (self-)expression, For these authors, Romanticism constitutes a crucial, yet challenging point of reference – in formal as well as ideological terms. Centring on formal constructions of poetic subjectivities, my thesis seek to analyse this relationship and argues that it is, in fact, functionalised productively in the attempt to model subject positions that challenge culturally established binary oppositions.

On the one hand, these poets tend to avoid, for example, nostalgic, anthropocentric approaches to nature or the masculinisation of the lyric ‘I’ and try to find ways to dissolve the subject-centred approach of Romantic lyric poetry. On the other hand, however, they continue Romantic concepts of the creative imagination and organic form and draw on genres, specific metaphors and imagery established by Romantic poets in the intent to formally ‘naturalise’ poetic language. Moreover, the way the poets stage themselves in poetological discourse, as mediators between nature and culture, art and life, recreates Romanic ideals of authorship. Yet, at the same time, they construct specific visions of Romanticism as antithetical to environmentalist, feminist or postcolonial poetics. Taking these contradictions as a starting point, the project aims to explore which different Romanticisms are (de)constructed here and how individual aesthetic practices of Romantic poetry are simultaneously countered and appropriated (cf. O’Neill 2007) in order to find alternative ways of modelling subjective experience.

In their quest for poetic subjects and objects in-between cultural hierarchies such as the nature/culture divide, these post-Romantic authors in fact deal with the same problem Romantic literature responds to: the paradox that the particular cannot be rendered universal without being mediated, that the subjective perspective of lyric poetry can never be fully transcended. Yet, poets of the late 20th/early 21st century encounter this crisis of expression within different cultural and epistemological contexts than the Romantics. Their texts also tend to self-reflexively display an awareness of this connection with Romanticism and deliberately attempt to transcend it. Finally, Romanticism itself is an instable concept, connoting tradition and innovation, marginality and cultural prestige at the same time. However, it could be exactly this paradoxicality which accounts for its lasting productive presence in contemporary poetry and Western cultures at large. Taking these aspects into account, my study will further develop the notion of the ‘post-Romantic’, a term that so far has not been sufficiently theorised in scholarship, in order to grasp such constructions of relationships of difference.

Supervisors:
Prof. Dr. Klaus Stierstorfer (Münster), Prof. Dr. Rainer Emig (Hannover), Prof. Michael O'Neill (Durham)