Item Details

title

Visionary Poets of Doubt and Unspeaking: A Study of British Romanticism and Apophatic Discourse

author

McCracken, Kaitlyn Lauren

abstract

This study is an examination of apophatic discourse as utilized by three major writers of the British Romantic movement. The poetry and prose of Samuel Coleridge, Percy Shelley, and John Keats features various iterations of the unsayable from the liminal to valorizations of the negative sublime. Apophasis is traditionally associated with negative theology, but I intend to demonstrate how Romantic poets borrow from both classical and Christian tradition in the deification of their art, and subjects, beyond representation. This thesis will analyze selected poems and prose through motifs of absence, silence, and the unnameable. Ultimately, this method of unsaying ushers in modernity and celebrates potentiality wherein Romantic conceptions of sublimity, identity, and infinity are demonstrative of a language that is shrouded in a “mist” and “veil” of doubt and the ineffable beyond ordinary perception, semantics, and nominalism. Romantic apophasis results in a language that engages with the self, the Natural world, and the eternal and literature becomes a divine entity in which it “extends beyond itself” (Ferris 67).

subject

Apophasis

Coleridge

Keats

Romanticism

Shelley

contributor

Wilson, Eric G (committee chair)

Holdridge, Jefferson (committee member)

Shirey, Ryan (committee member)

date

2021-01-13T09:35:31Z (accessioned)

2022-01-12T09:30:10Z (available)

2020 (issued)

degree

English (discipline)

embargo

2022-01-12 (terms)

identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/10339/97962 (uri)

language

en (iso)

publisher

Wake Forest University

type

Thesis