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theses

This dissertation argues that Victorian experiments with rhyme grew out of a broader cultural fascination with the literary historical myths found in contemporary aesthetics and historiography. Although rhyme has come to be regarded as an unsophisticated sound effect, for Victorians it provoked urgent questions about the relationship between past and present, the importance of national and ethnic identity, and even the nature of human experience. In nineteenth-century literary historical prose, the advent of rhyme signaled the beginning of the modern European literary tradition and, by extension, the emergence of modern subjectivity. Its origins were consequently a matter of passionate dispute. Through a range of formal techniques from stanzaic patterning to assonance to blank verse, poets entered live debates about rhyme: whether it began in the East or West, how it moved into English literature, whether it signified spiritual achievement or cultural decline, and how it registered in the mind and body. Drawing on a rich archive of prose written and read by Victorian poets but largely neglected now, I show that nineteenth-century conceptions of literary history were not identical with our own. To understand Victorian poetic forms, this dissertation proposes, we need to think less about literary history as a stable category and more about a proliferation of competing literary historiographies. Thus, “Rhyme and History in Victorian Poetics” takes up recent challenges to think historically about literary form, but it does so by recovering the nineteenth-century assumption that forms and histories are necessarily entwined. This study engages with current scholarship on prosody, the history of literary criticism and aesthetics, Victorian transnationalism, and literary formalisms as it reconstructs a nineteenth-century canon of rhyme theories. Individual chapters show Arthur Hallam mining Arabist historiography for evidence of rhyme’s affective powers; Alfred Tennyson using Provençal poetics to reinvent the lyric stanza; Elizabeth Barrett Browning devising a capacious “rhymatology” that encompasses even epic blank verse; and Coventry Patmore building a new form of ode out of a historiographic theory of pauses.

ETD_6811

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Naomi Grierson Levine

doi:10.7282/T3W37Z9G

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.