'The poetics of everyday life': The sublime as an aesthetic force in the lyric poetry of Emily Dickinson and Annette von Droste-Hulshoff

Emily Dickinson's and Annette von Droste-Hulshoff's poetry of the everyday is transfigured by the sublime. The dissertation uses close reading to stress form, suggesting that poetic practice cannot fold into the group mind-set of much late twentieth-century feminist literary criticism which tended to analyze women's writing in isolation as symptomatic of issues pertaining to gender. The dissertation places these writers firmly in their cultural and historical contexts, establishing parallels between Dickinson's and Droste's milieus. Both authors demonstrate aspects of late-Romanticism/Biedermeier-Romanticism, a reaction or taming of early-Romantic excesses. Thus the dissertation points the direction of women's writing away from gendered formations exclusively, to broader concerns pertaining to culture and society which include but are not limited to gender contingencies.