Browsing by Subject "Romantic"

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    Constructing identity in the Romantic Age: the medical writings of Jean-Baptiste Antoine Bénézet Pamard (1763-1827)
    (2010-08) Vandendriessche, Joris
    This study examines the way the French surgeon Jean-Baptiste Antoine Bénézet Pamard (1763-1827) viewed and presented himself as a learned man in the intellectual community of the early nineteenth century. It will argue that Pamard, in constructing an identity of a learned man, used both traditional and contemporary components, giving his own „Romantic‟ interpretation to the eighteenth-century learned tradition. By looking at his correspondence and publications, this study will show how Pamard, a surgeon in Avignon, positioned himself as a „local health expert‟, who translated his scientific expertise to a broad audience, in Avignon‟s urban community. Such a position gained him access to the city‟s learned circles in which he soon established himself by showing the literary qualities he possessed in addition to his scientific expertise. In doing so, Pamard skilfully adapted his work to fit the expectations of various audiences. Pamard‟s self-image as a learned man was also „Romantic‟ because of the place he gave to emotions in his professional activities. Pamard, for example, not only shared the joys and sorrows of family life with his correspondents – as was typical of eighteenth-century friendly relations between learned men – but also felt the need to deal with them more privately through reflections in his personal notebook, showing the self-awareness of the „Romantic‟ generation. Moreover, his notebook, as a site of both scientific research and identity construction, shows the impact of these reflections upon his medical observations and thus demonstrates the intertwinement of self-reflection and scientific research in the Romantic period.
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    Entangled Influence: Wordsworth and Darwinism in the Late Victorian Period
    (2014-07) Olsen, Trenton B.
    This dissertation examines the intersection of William Wordsworth's influence and evolutionary theory---the nineteenth century's two defining representations of nature---in late Victorian literature and society. Victorian writers were sensitive to the compatibilities and conflicts between these philosophies, and Wordsworth's poetry was enlisted in arguments both for and against evolution. Creative writers and critics alike turned to the poet as an alternative or antidote to evolution, criticized and revised his poetry in response to this discourse, and synthesized elements of each to propose their own modified theories. In engaging with Wordsworth's influence in this way, these writers began to see literary influence and history in Darwinian terms. They viewed their engagement with Wordsworth and Darwin, which was both competitive and collaborative, as a struggle for literary survival and offspring as well as transformative encounters in their development. This model of "literary selection" synthesizes opposing influence theories, and differs from objectivist accounts of Darwinian cultural transmission through its emphasis on writers' subjectivities, idiosyncratic language, and conscious adoption and modification of evolutionary ideas in their literary relationships. The opening chapter surveys a broad range of critical and creative writing to demonstrate the prevalence of Wordsworth's and Darwin's intertwining influences in the period, and outlines the various ideological positions late Victorian writers occupied toward these entangled philosophies. The chapter explores these simultaneous influences in the work of Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Charles Kingsley, and Emily Pfieffer along with a host of Victorian critics. The three central chapters provide in-depth demonstrations of this argument in the work of Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Robert Louis Stevenson, respectively. The final chapter moves beyond literature to read the late nineteenth-century conservation movement, in which The Wordsworth Society helped establish the National Trust to preserve the Lake District's landscape, as a conflict between Wordsworthian and Darwinian ideas.