Romantic investiture: Formations of the secular in British Romanticism

This dissertation reexamines the relationship between secularization and British Romanticism. Taking into account recent interdisciplinary scholarly debates about the "secular," in the first chapter I offer a model for understanding secularity and secularization, one which draws upon both Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (2007) as well as the renewed interest in a psychoanalytically based understanding of religious experience found in recent work by Eric Santner, A. Kiarina Kordela, Slavoj Zizek, and Julia Kristeva. One advantage of Taylor's book is that it implies that secularization can be treated as a functional problem. During the process of secularization a blockage or break occurs in the channels of access to a feeling of fullness traditionally regulated through religious ritual and praxis. This project explores how this secular "investiture crisis"---or disruption in the traditional means of distributing cultural patterns and value---relates to a distinctive Romantic aesthetics.;Romantic writers respond to this investiture crisis in divergent ways. The first of two chapters on William Wordsworth focuses on the model of subjectivity he develops in his autobiographical epic poem The Prelude, while the second explores models of neighborliness and community within his poetry. This chapter also draws upon the work of the political theorist William Connolly and the neurobiologist Joseph LeDoux to help explain the inner workings of investiture. The fourth chapter discusses the orienting strategies of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and then addresses how Coleridge's "Poetic Faith" relates to his Christian faith by exploring the biblical reading practices advocated in Aids to Reflection (1825) and the accompanying essay "Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit." The fifth and final chapter examines how Percy Shelley's play The Cenci (1819) offers a model for a philosophical view of reform that emphasizes tactics of reticence designed to divest us from pernicious ideological systems, thus providing even an atheist like Shelley an opening into the future through which the advent of justice may yet come.