Description
TitleThe peevish wish
Date Created2019
Other Date2019-01 (degree)
SubjectLiteratures in English, Prediction (Logic), English literature -- 19th century, Walpole, Horace, 1717-1797. Castle of Otranto., Radcliffe, Ann Ward, 1764-1823. Italian, or, The confessional of the black penitents., Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834. Christabel., Scott, Walter, 1771-1832., Wordsworth, William, 1770-1850., Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792-1822. Cenci., Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851. Frankenstein.
Extent1 online resource (231 pages)
DescriptionThis dissertation traces British Romantic literature’s deep moral investment in the unjustified or aimless idea. That investment materializes as conjecture, which offers a means of expressing an idea without yet making a claim for what the idea ultimately signifies. Conjecture, therefore, is the form that thought takes when it aims beyond what it knows that it can presently justify as content.
The project traces conjecture from the Enlightenment texts of Adam Smith, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant to the poems, novels and plays of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, and Mary and Percy Shelley. In these writers, conjecture unsettles narratives whose outcomes had seemed fixed and worlds that had appeared closed. As a narrative mode, conjecture acts as a placeholder for thoughts that have not yet found their final guiding idea or their final frame of reference. In some cases, conjecture takes the form of an unresolved question: narrators and characters are left gesturing at the place where an answer should go, but without thereby claiming to actually have found an answer. In other cases, conjecture takes the reverse form: the answer is there, but without the question that would make the answer meaningful. The idea lacks its frame of reference. In either case, an idea persists in the subject’s mind even when it is not yet—or is no longer—a live possibility for him or her.
The idealism in conjecture looks like simply being out of touch with reality. Kant, for example, talks about “the peevish wish … one that nothing satisfies.” Peevishness is usually considered a disengagement from others—something merely contrarian. However, one can appear contrarian precisely because one hasn’t disengaged from others; because one hasn’t silenced oneself. Conjecture keeps its thought alive in the faith that the idea does matter and that it does merit engagement, even when one can’t yet explain why.
In conjectural literature, thoughts that feel idle, provisional, or incomplete turn out to reflect deep moral investments in ideas that cannot yet be fully articulated or justified. Such thoughts frustrate one’s current understanding and thus take one outside of oneself. In these texts, as a result, the moral imagination remains collectively shared; the thoughts that appear most solipsistic at the time turn out never to have been properly one’s own to begin with. For the present, however, conjecture leaves its subject in a position of darkness and doubt. And when it does, characters and narrators see how their own doubts might eventually contribute to the better moral understanding of others—even if they themselves will never share in that understanding. The peevish wish ultimately seeks a transformed world, not for oneself, but for others.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Noteby Isaac Bainbridge Cowell
Genretheses, ETD doctoral
Languageeng
CollectionSchool of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.