Virtual Realities: Literary Change and Fantasies of Social-Material Community in British Poetry and Criticism, 1725-1785.

Abstract

This dissertation interprets the history of literary change in eighteenth-century British poetry and criticism in light of the fantasies of interacting with real or 'true' environments that appear constantly within the two genres. The dissertation proposes that these fantasy lay behind the most important innovations in poetry and criticism from 1725-85 and allowed various poets and critics to imagine moments in which the individual felt both fully alive and fully secure in its moral and social commitments. The dissertation traces such fantasies of in six successive critical and poetic innovations from 1725-85, each of which presents a new vision of the subject giving him- or herself over to a 'true' environment that affirms and reinforces his or her social world. The first chapter shows how the nature poetry written by James Thomson and Stephen Duck in the 1720-30s created the first visions of a subject capable of finding moral security via interacting with local material landscapes. The next chapter details how two very different innovative genres in the 1730-50s—literary historicist criticism and imaginative neo-Pindaric poetry—made such moments central to national culture and in turn linked the great cultures of the past to the present. The fourth chapter shows how new forms of moralizing criticism based on the 'genius' and 'pure poetry' during the Seven Years War redefined poetry in terms of moments of interaction with true or real objects. The final chapter, plus a short interlude on the Ossian poems, tracks the variety of ways that new forms of poetry from the 1760-80s envisioned different ways in which the subject could feel complete via interactions with local environments. The dissertation also shows how these various literary innovations presented new ways of relating to grounding 'truths' such as nature, nation, history, and God. In composing fantasies of social-material environments, writers made these entities less principles or pure abstractions than places or realms to be experienced and felt.