The aesthetics of abstraction and the romantic sublime in modern poetry and prose (Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stevens)

Wallace Stevens asserts in the first subtitle to Notes toward a Supreme Fiction (1942) that poetry "must be abstract." In his call for an abstract poetics, Stevens expresses a central impulse of the modern aesthetic---the urge toward abstraction---that drives and shapes the modernist project in the twentieth century. My dissertation explores the aesthetics of abstraction in British and American literature from the first half of the twentieth century through the analysis of three writers---Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Wallace Stevens---against the historical backdrop of romantic attitudes toward the sublime. In chapter I, I take up Wilhelm Worringer's influential study Abstraction and Empathy (1908) to argue that Worringer's understanding of art in terms of two psychological impulses---the urge toward abstraction and the urge toward empathy---is really a modern version of the older distinction between the sublime and beautiful, respectively. I then demonstrate how the category of the sublime, culminating in the Kantian (negative) sublime, provides an aesthetic threshold between two kinds of beauty: between the organic beauty in nature and a new, crystalline beauty in art. Through the transmuting power of the romantic imagination, (pure) abstraction emerges as the second type of beauty.; From this analysis I proceed in chapter 2 to explore how the structure of this aesthetic threshold unfolds through the investigation of William Wordsworth's liminal sublime, Percy Shelley's "trance sublime," and John Keats's "material sublime." The next three chapters examine the development of literary abstraction in the writers who drew inspiration from the abstract art movements in Paris, London, and New York. I argue that while Stein exemplifies the geometric, intellectual line of abstraction influenced by cubism, Woolf expresses a fluid, psychological abstraction, comparable to the spiritual compositions of Kandinsky, although each style continually informs the other. The final chapter analyzes Stevens's poetics of reduction, which offers a deeply complex and divided response to the sublime. His abstract project culminates in Notes, where the poet posits the giant, an "abstraction blooded" that symbolizes the dream of spiritual incarnation, of embodying the "inconceivable idea of the sun" in the "muddy centre" of existence.