| In addition to artistically representing the ideal human, a.k.a. the Romantic citizen, and his development, Anna Barbauld was invested in the actual practice of raising him, devoting much of her life to co-directing the Palgrave School for Boys, a Dissenting academy. Her pupil Lord Denman ultimately drafted the Reform Act of 1832. As Barbauld recapitulates the path of human development through her Lessons for Children, Hymns in Prose for Children, political treatises, and poetry, she traces the process of becoming a poet, a citizen, an ideal human being, a nation, and a global community. Her career of artistic and pedagogical intervention causes the term revolution, which is so often used by Romantic writers to designate artistic and political innovation and independence in a sublime moment, to return to its pre-French Revolution sense in the discourse of astronomy---a slow, gradual, revolving, process or continuation, in which (with a little help from Wordsworth's "My heart leaps up") the "child is father of the citizen." At the heart of this dissertation is a fascination with Barbauld's double power: her power as someone interested in the development of individuals, witness her teaching and pedagogical writing, and her power as an artist having a more abstract, Romantic interest in the development of the ideal human.Chapter One, "Barbauld's Culture and Aesthetics of Dissent," examines the culture of dissent in which Barbauld operated it discusses the relevant historical context of religious Dissent in England and Barbauld's own position within the Dissenting community, in order to demonstrate the internal, artistic choices that make up Barbauld's signature aesthetics of dissent. Her Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (1790), and Remarks on Mr. Gilbert Wakefield's Enquiry Into the Expediency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship (1792) are exemplary conflations of what appears to be, the narrow, particular discourse of the propriety of private and public religious practice and the national, legislative discourse over the rights of citizens. By joining, or mediating, congregational interests and national interests in her Remarks on Mr. Gilbert Wakefield's Enquiry, Barbauld deftly conflates the identities of devout Christian and democratic citizen.Chapter Two, "'To prepare, not to bring about revolutions:' The developmental relationship between Barbauld's Hymns in Prose for Children (1781) and Sins of Government, Sins of a Nation or a Discourse for the Fast, Appointed on April 19, 1793," focuses on the developmental relationship between Sins of Government, Sins of a Nation and Hymns in Prose for Children. Barbauld's widely popular Hymns, reprinted in England for over 120 years, provides astonishing evidence of her position at the origins of British nationalism.Chapter Three, "Of Caterpillars and Baby-Houses: Barbauld's Signature Aesthetics of Contractions and Bubble Spaces," focuses on Barbauld's signature aesthetics developed in her poetry---particularly her aesthetics of bubble spaces and the technique of rhetorical and symbolic contraction. In "To a Little Invisible Being" (1825), the "infant bud of being" that the poet-speaker hastens "to blow" from the womb into a little visible being resides in a critically delicate bubble space. Within the physically pregnant space, a primarily sexed (and gendered) woman's experience, the ode identifies a subject whose key moment of existence is pregendered, pre-sexed, pre-lingual---conceived, and yet unspoken. This space is not unlike the Romantic poet's fleeting moment of creative imagination between encounter and response, thought and utterance. This chapter closely examines the so far under-examined Woman in Barbauld's poetry.Chapter Four, "Towards a Post-National Romantic Citizen: Sublime Alternations Between a Pre-Symbolic Feminine Subjectivity in 'A Summer Evening's Meditation' and a Post-National Romantic Citizen in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven" considers Barbauld's addresses to the nation, and the possible post-nation state, in what seem to be their generic maturity. That is, her image of a seed taking root and growing up to an oak tree from her Hymns in Prose for Children, which prosaically develops in her sermon on national character and proper revolution, Sins of Government, Sins of a Nation, matures in her epic poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, the last poem she would publish in her career. In Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, England will fall into ruin because the best of English culture has left and found root in the more fertile soil of the U.S. In time, the once postcolonial other (American) will return in pilgrimage to pay homage to the graves and ruins of England. Since Eighteen Hundred and Eleven has come to represent the end of Barbauld's public writing career, it is interesting to read alongside possible inheritance texts, such as Mary Shelley's novel The Last Man. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
