The poetics of discovery: Materiality, aesthetics and history in British literature, 1798--1869

The Poetics of Discovery focuses on key moments in the evolution of the discourse of discovery in British Literature and culture from the publication of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798 to Browning's The Ring and the Book in 1869. Both the literary and philosophical writing of this period reflects on the material and intellectual practices of discovery. The project relates an exemplary selection of such texts to the complex political, social and cultural relations in which they occur. It argues that the early poetry of Alfred Tennyson signals a decisive historical shift in the literary engagement with discovery, away from the event of discovery to the knowledge it made available.;The dissertation discusses the function of legal practices of discovery in Wordsworth's poetics; the impact of late eighteenth century voyages of discovery on the Coleridge's poetry and German Idealist philosophy; the thematic intersection of discovery and the sublime in Romantic poetry; the literary repercussions of sponsored programs of discovery in Tennyson; and the potential of the literary anecdote to discover historical truth.