Forms Less Solid: Duration and the Romantic Long Form

Abstract

Forms Less Solid argues that Romanticism’s long forms trouble established assumptions about literary form through their thematic representation and formal recreation of duration and phenomenological experience. The formalist history these texts work against makes two primary claims: first, that literary form is inherently atemporal and thus averse to length, and, second, that British Romanticism uniformly promotes that vision of form (and, by extension, that Romantic form is equivalent to the Romantic lyric). Forms Less Solid argues, instead, for the unique, extended temporality of the Romantic long form by reading four Romantic and post-Romantic long-form works of poetry and fiction. This project reads Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head (1807), William Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) and Sir Walter Scott’s The Antiquary (1816) as part of an alternative tradition that constructs length and duration as formal categories in their own right. These long forms employ what Forms Less Solid terms “durational modes”: postures, figures, or attitudes that represent in content the embodied, spatiotemporal nature of lived experience and, in turn, recreate and perform that experience on the level of form. Forms Less Solid argues that durational form is the method by which these texts formalize their own embeddedness in time and space, a feature that emerges only as a result of the prolonged engagement these texts require from their readers. The introductory first chapter details the converging literary and social histories of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (the prospect tradition, industrialization, and the development of the Greater Romantic Lyric) that gave rise to the Romantic long form, along with relevant scholarly contexts. Chapter Two, on Smith’s Beachy Head, argues that the poem’s formal and thematic expansiveness is replicated in its oscillations between scales of analysis, geographic elevations, and between main text and footnotes. That expansiveness is held in check by the poem’s equal and opposite emphasis on representing the limitations of embodied experience. This chapter also uses Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (1784-1800) to demonstrate how Smith’s long form emerges out of her previous engagement with atemporal form. Chapter Three reads Wordsworth’s most “long and laborious” work, The Excursion, as a counterpoint to Wordsworth’s great period poems. The Excursion is a self-reflective text designed to make the reader confront its own structural composition in the time of reading. Chapter Four explores Aurora Leigh as a post-Romantic text that reworks certain Romantic renderings (here represented by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Cowper) of the relationship between natural and domestic spaces. Aurora Leigh incorporates the gendered aspects of embodied experience into its protagonist’s development as a Poetess and into its own formal configuration. Chapter Five reads Scott’s The Antiquary as depicting a narrative time-sense that imitates the profession of its title and prioritizes local “accidents” over wholistic historical knowledge and narrative design. This chapter, as a result, reads The Antiquary as offering a formal and thematic counternarrative to Scott’s most famous and genre-defining novel, Waverley. The sixth and final chapter, a short coda, reflects briefly on the wider contemporary and personal contexts that have informed this project.