| In the Romantic period, the process of urbanization approached a crisis. British cities had expanded along with the nation's commercial and manufacturing economy throughout the long eighteenth century. While Enlightenment political economy argued that urbanization promoted economic growth by enabling greater specialization and routinization of labor, the process also compromised the living and working conditions of the working class. The social order of the polite city broke down as that of the industrial city was still emerging in a blind transition haunted by the memory urban riots and the constant possibility of a popular revolution. In my dissertation, I argue that the Romantic poets question urbanization in its contemporary form and as represented in eighteenth-century poetry and Enlightenment political economy. I analyze the ways Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley represent the social effects of the process, its ends, and what might be done to reform it.;The Romantics represent urbanization as an open and equivocal process that concentrates the means of both social administration and social reform and revolution. They recognize not only the social costs of its current form but also its potential to contribute to the emergence of a more egalitarian society. This combination---of a skeptical sense of indeterminacy with egalitarian concern---distinguishes Romantic representations of the city from those of their eighteenth-century predecessors. Enlightenment political economy considers urbanization as a stage in the self-regulating and socially progressive evolution of the market, and eighteenth-century poets depict the city primarily in a georgic or locodescriptive mode; both present the city as comprehensible and stable. The Romantics, however, invent a new set of poetic strategies to figure the equivocal and dynamic aspects of urbanization. They recast urbanization as a dialectical process; the city, a momentary image of an open process, contains contrary possibilities of repression and revolution. They seek to represent the people and spaces invisible or marginal in eighteenth-century discourse about urbanization, and they entertain the possibility that the poet, as a creator of aesthetic forms, may be able to reshape the structure of urban life and amend its influence on those who live within it.;My dissertation contributes to three active and intersecting levels of critical discourse: the study of urban society and culture in Romanticism, the literary history of representations of the city, and the criticism on individual Romantic poets. First, my dissertation extends and revises Raymond Williams's analysis of the period in The Country and the City and proposes a conceptual apparatus flexible enough to relate recent work on metropolitan culture and publics to the processes transforming social geography. Second, this project offers a new approach to the literary history of representations of the city. By focusing on representations of urbanization as a social process rather than only on the city as an environment, my dissertation makes space for the influential thought of poets such as Coleridge and Shelley and for the work of contemporary urban theorists. Finally, by attending to previously unexamined threads of concern within the poets' oeuvres, I offer new readings of their characteristic social thought and poetic strategies. |
