| Summary: | <p>This thesis argues that Victorian poets were persistently drawn to the experience of partial,
uncertain, or elusive knowledge, situations in which knowing is felt to be simultaneously
tantalising and potentially entrapping or chimerical: a set of conditions I group under the
term ‘unknowing’. Exploring the ways in which the idea of knowledge in the nineteenth
century was saturated in value and feeling, I show how the resistance of certain objects to
being fully known (people, God, art, nature, the future) could generate not merely
frustration and disappointment but fresh sources of possibility and pleasure. For the poets I
study, such concerns were intimately linked to the question of poetry’s own relationship to
knowledge. In the fibres of their poetry, as well as in the writings of some of the period’s
most inventive thinkers, I trace a vital and availing tradition which stresses how poetry
may sharpen our awareness of that which exceeds or escapes our knowing.</p>
<br>
<p>My first chapter reads the poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough as a sustained dialogue with
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s critique of ‘knowingness’. My second connects Robert
Browning’s interest in the natural world with notions of foiled or occluded knowledge,
drawing on the writings of John Ruskin. My third chapter proposes two ways of thinking
about knowing in the poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: an aesthetics of vagueness
stemming from Renaissance art theory, and the dreamlike phenomenology of déjà vu. My
fourth chapter pursues Alice Meynell’s interest in God’s hiddenness as a potential resource
of faith, linking it to the thought of John Henry Newman and the figure of the Virgin
Mary. My final chapter explores Thomas Hardy’s attention to the difficulties of knowing
(and being known by) other people, showing how more fruitful modes of engagement may
depend upon relinquishing the desire for secure knowledge.</p>
|
|---|