Negative capabilities: Anonymity, subjectivity, and Romantic agency

Negative Capabilities imagines alternatives to the traditional Romantic models of identity and action, which privilege individual empowerment and emotional autonomy. These models, moreover, have often been the focus of the contemporary critique of Romanticism's purported self-absorption and alienation from politics. My dissertation responds to this debate by approaching Romantic subjectivity through its fascination with anonymity as an ethics of engaged withdrawal or strategic reticence. The social relations I trace in my study conceive how Romantic subjectivity, even as it negotiates with others in the social sphere, is radically impersonal and dispossessed. Rather than failing to claim authenticity or solidarity, such a subjectivity stubbornly resists the requirement to inhabit a social category, and remains open to change and redescription. Through close readings of Romantic era philosophical texts, novels, poems, and occasional essays, this dissertation takes seriously the diverse arguments made for nonidentity and situates such arguments according to important cultural changes witnessed by the late eighteenth century: the development of radical politics in Britain; changing definitions of authorship; the politics of sympathetic identification; and the significance of gender in relation to skeptical knowledge. As these examples suggest, anonymity is not conceptualized univocally in the Romantic period, and what emerges in the work of the writers I study is a broader understanding of interiority as the site of a productive vacancy. Whether it is impersonal narration in Rousseau and Godwin, the principle of disinterest in William Hazlitt and John Keats, sympathy in David Hume, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, and Percy Shelley, or the dispossessed figure of the female melancholic in Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen, my dissertation argues that Romantic explorations of anonymity ascribe greater ethical meaning and value to those forms of action and thought that resist self-designation and display.