| The first interdisciplinary study of the water cycle and its four quarters (springs, rivers, seas, clouds/rain), this dissertation covers Western European literature (primarily poetry, but on occasion lyrical prose) and painting produced in what might loosely be termed the "romantic" vein. The Introduction, concerned with methodological problems innate to the study of the mutual illumination of the arts--such as the nature of image and symbol in the context of different artistic media--, is followed by a chapter offering a succinct typological survey of seventeenth- (Baroque) and eighteenth- (neoclassicism) century uses of the water cycle and its constituent elements.; The body of the dissertation consists of four chapters, each focusing on one phase of the cycle as represented in German (Goethe and Lenau among others), English (Byron and Shelley), French (Rousseau and Victor Hugo) and Spanish poetry. Intermittent references to the significant use of elements of the water cycle in "lyrical" prose (Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers and Rousseau's Reveries d'un promeneur solitaire) are also made. The study is capped by a chapter analyzing the corresponding phenomena in English (Turner and Constable), German (Caspar David Friedrich and Joseph Anton Koch) and French (Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg) painting. In this chapter, particular emphasis is placed on Friedrich's Lebensalter-Zyklus, a series of sepias in which the entire water cycle is used symbolically and allegorically.; As the analysis of a large body of poetic and pictorial work created in the "Age of Romanticism" reveals, one of the chief uses to which the writers and artists active between 1770 and 1840 put the sequential/circular features of the water cycle was that of serving as a vehicle for expressing their belief in Dauer im Wechsel. Theirs was a paradoxical world view culminating in the belief that there is permanence in change, and that man must reconcile himself to the fact that life, ending in death, is part of an eternal process exemplified by nature. |
