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This dissertation examines how the pedant, a seemingly familiar object of satire, came to personify passionate intellectual absorption in romantic-era writing. The pedant’s ostentatious displays of erudition might seem antithetical to the spirit of an age conventionally associated with the veneration of nature, childhood innocence, and untutored genius. Indeed, pedantry had first attracted attention in eighteenth-century British literature as a problem concerning the performance of specialized knowledge, exemplified by professionals who use jargon outside its proper context. For advocates of polite conversation, excessive attachments to useless knowledge threatened social intercourse by making an individual’s preoccupations a matter of public discourse. Various romantic-era texts, however, imagine other ends for these objects of polite Augustan censure as sources of rhetorical suasion and aesthetic delight. From the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, British writing celebrated the figure of the rambling professional: soldiers, sailors, lawyers, clergymen, and authors whose ardent attachments to useless knowledge structure their conversation and writing. In fact, the romantic pedant’s digressions furnish a recurrent model for literary forms strongly associated with the period. William Hazlitt’s familiar essays, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s fragmentary autobiography-cum-philosophical treatise, the blathering personae of Walter Scott’s novels, and the antiquarian-inflected speakers of ballads by Robert Burns and William Wordsworth each characterize the relation between feeling and language as an ambivalent product of life in a fragmented world defined by professional specialization. The lyric involution of Wordsworth’s solitaries, the historical musing of Scott’s narrators, and the political and erotic infidelity of Coleridge and Burns are motivated by simultaneous feelings of immersion and rootlessness. Absorbed in process, whether at the level of minute detail or grand abstraction, the romantic pedant loses sight of outcomes and practical ends. In pedantry, romantic-period writing adopted an ubiquitous term of rebuke and refashioned it into a characteristic mental and physical disposition, an individuated persona that typifies impassioned expression.

ETD_4375

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Sean Patrick Barry

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.1/rucore10001600001.ETD.000066611

doi:10.7282/T3FQ9VDH

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.

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