Personal and Vernacular Voices: reimagined relationship with the past in Early British Romantic literature.

Abstract

Personal and Vernacular Voices examines the depiction of personal pasts in literary writings of Romantic Britain to consider the new kind of historical writing that arose in communication with the emergence of modern historical consciousness. Moving away from the interests and concerns of Enlightenment historiography, the writers I explore turn personal accounts of the past into a larger historical vision that allows their readers to rethink the past, the present, and the future. I read literary representations of the personal and vernacular past written by William Godwin, Ann Yearsley, Maria Edgeworth, and William Wordsworth, and argue that the personal pasts these literary works delve into reveal the affective connection between the past and the present that obliquely answers the question of the growing gap between past experience and future expectation, conceptualized by Reinhart Koselleck as “the space of experience” and “the horizon of expectation.” In my dissertation, I argue that the affective exchange created in Romantic history writing stimulates a close and interactive relationship between the past, the present, and the future as the emotive weight of the past exerts its enduring influence on the present reader. The writers I examine propose a relationship with the past that is rooted in the subjective, the personal, and the particular. I maintain their forward-looking literary representation of pasts purposefully stresses imagination and sympathy so that it will turn into a pursuit of an alternative future. Moreover, a radical quality develops from Romantic representation of the past as its inherent fragmentariness of the personalized and vernacular past suggests history not as a teleological narrative but as an unfinished space, a space that allows and requires active imagination to fill in and further create. My first chapter investigates the importance and implications of reading and writing individual history as opposed to a universal one. Reading the early works of William Godwin, who is often known as the radical rationalist, I identify Godwin’s attempt to bridge the past and the present by pursuing an intimate and evolving relationship with the “illustrious dead.” Notwithstanding his reputation, Godwin promotes a warm friendship with “the reformers, the instructors, and improvers” of the past. By cultivating an affective relationship between the historical figures and the present reader, Godwin urges the reader to take up their unfinished tasks and continue their works of social reform. In this way, Godwin not only bridges the past and the present but also successfully transforms individual accounts of the past into a communal historical vision. In my next chapter, I explore the role of imagination in the recreation of the past. I read the poems and prose of Ann Yearsley, also known as the milkmaid of Bristol. Although Yearsley shares certain historical insights with Godwin, her historical perspective is still unique; in addition to their shared aim of correcting the prejudice against the “illustrious dead,” Yearsley addresses middle-class prejudice that does not recognize the dignity and intellect of the laboring class. In her poems that look back on historical events and characters, Yearsley fills in the blank with her imagination and depicts the virtue of groups of people which was previously unacknowledged in middle-class writing. In her ambitious epic poem “Brutus,” Yearsley creatively posits “yielding” as the new foundational virtue of Britain and turns the imaginative past into a call for a more open and democratic future of the nation. My third chapter introduces a perspective outside of English consciousness and depicts a colonial past that rather ominously prevails in the present. I read Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, in which Edgeworth reveals an Irish past that is experienced differently by the people of Ireland than the English one by the people of England. Unlike Godwin, Yearsley, and Wordsworth who try to build an emotive connection between the past and the present, Edgeworth shows with her chaotic novel that the past dominates the present and the future in Ireland as colonial rule wreaks havoc on the order of things, including the progress of time and causal relations. Borrowing the voice of an old Irish Catholic steward Thady, Edgeworth portrays a picture of Ireland that only repeats the past rather than generates different futures. The call for a different future in Edgeworth’s case is a seemingly impossible departure from the past. In my final chapter, I consider the power of literature in preserving the history of the marginalized. I closely read William Wordsworth’s poems that transcribe the experience of rural lives and dramatize the pressures of historical change. In delivering traumatic experiences of these dying communities, I argue that Wordsworth makes use of the power of literature, especially that of poetry, which he delineates in his “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads. Poeticizing their stories is not only a way of recording their tales, but also a way of effectively memorializing and creating new meanings for their lives. In “Michael,” for instance, Wordsworth reveals that while the nostalgic past is not sustainable and can no longer teach us how to live, it holds an emotive potential and can take up a new role, teaching us how to “feel for others,” becoming a teacher of feelings rather than of life.