Written on the water: British Romanticism and the culture of Maritime Empire (William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

Although social and political historians have long considered the Second British Empire a crucially nautical enterprise, literary historians and critics have seldom analyzed how the Romantic writers who flourished under that empire's aegis represented the sea and their nation's relation to it. This study takes up that challenge. Insisting upon the fundamental importance for modern culture—indeed, for the very idea of culture—of marine concerns, it shows that the constitutive imagination of Romantic literary culture was in central ways a maritime imagination. Maritime plots, tropes, and topoi, it contends, fundamentally inform the spatial imaginary of British Romantic literature, and moreover its social imaginary. To the familiar Romantic landscapes of mountains, lake country, and moors, it adduces seascape scenes of haunted beaches, coastal prospects, and ageless oceans, while stressing how the era's new social order of literary culture gains representative subjects in such figures as Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Wedding Guest, Byron's seafaring heroes, and the members of Austen's naval families.; The central claim of the dissertation is that the Romantics adapted their maritime imaginative horizons to form what became the conceptual horizons of “culture.” When Wordsworth and Coleridge, in particular, depicted how commerce incorporates all other styles of social life—styles often identified with the Virgilian modes of pastoral, georgic, and epic—they represented this process unfolding across the expansive canvas of their maritime Empire. They not only made the sea the ultimate imaginative stage on which to dramatize modern culture's emergence and display its form, but also invested the very idea of culture with the organizational logic developed by Britain's maritime-commercial society. The dissertation thus explores the consequences for the idea of culture of the ways in which these writers, and others of the era that runs from Oliver Goldsmith to Matthew Arnold, envisioned their national cultural situation not only across the space of the land, where most subsequent political and historicist criticism has expected to find such representations, but also across the space of the sea.