The ecstasy of influence: Life writing in the works of Bettine von Arnim and Mary Shelley

This dissertation explores two main issues: it asks how autobiographies and biographies can be written after Romantic authors and philosophers had radically questioned the subject's representability in a text, and, secondly, it challenges the widely accepted notion that literary influence is fraught with anxiety. At least since Harold Bloom's influential study The Anxiety of Influence, critics seem unable to conceive of writers relating to each other in a way that is not competitive or anxious. Yet the works of Bettine von Amim and Mary Shelley demand that we rethink Bloom's theory. They create a mode of writing that does not suffer from an "anxiety of influence," but rather celebrates what I call, adapting a term suggested by Jonathan Lethem, the "ecstasy of influence." Arnim and Shelley both set themselves the task of commemorating the writers they were close to and whom they had survived by many years. Their works are driven by love, desire and a sense of responsibility towards the memory of Goethe (Arnim) and Percy Shelley (Shelley). Aware of their contemporaries' challenge to the genre of life writing, they endeavor to avoid the presumption of fully grasping their subjects. This does not mean that they engage in 'free play' and represent their subjects in whatever way they please. Rather, their writing about Goethe and Percy Shelley is motivated by a deep sense of responsibility. They hold onto a notion of truth by interweaving their subjects' voices with their own texts: they give a voice to the dead even as they affirm their own voices as women writers.;Following an Introduction that reviews Romantic theories of life writing, the first chapter investigates how Arnim incorporated Goethe's sonnets into her novel Goethe's Brieiwechsel mit einem Kinde. Chapter Two turns to Goethe's Dichtung and Wahrheit to compare Arnim's and Goethe's autobiographical projects. The final two chapters investigate how Mary Shelley incorporates Percy Shelley's work within her own, particularly in The Last Man and Lodore. The Epilogue briefly contrasts Arnim's and Shelley's projects of reviving their famous lovers to their engagement with dead women in Die Gunderrode (Arnim) and Lodore (Shelley).