Romancing the subject: Neo-Romantic theories of cognitive development in James, Lawrence, and Woolf (Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf)

In this dissertation, I argue that Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf align themselves with Romantic theories of cognitive development. These three modernists employed the epistemological theories of Coleridge, De Quincey, Shelley, and other Romantics as the basis for their own developmental theories. By turning to the Romantic age and its philosophical antecedents, Woolf, Lawrence, and James found a tradition rife with depictions of and appreciation for the developing child and the individual subject. Reinventing this tradition for their own use allowed James, Lawrence, and Woolf to create a foundation for their theories of subjectivity; it also presented a vehicle with which to advance their own interest in celebrating the importance of individuality and consciousness.; Chapter One presents an overview of the trope of the child in the nineteenth century and the particular ways in which James, Lawrence, and Woolf reinvented a particularly Romantic account of the child in their own literature; it also provides a brief account of the socio-cultural influences that dictated Romantic, Victorian, and modernist definitions of the developing subject. In the remainder of the dissertation, I examine the specific stages of development first articulated by the Romantics and later adopted by their Neo-Romantic predecessors. Chapter Two traces the first stage---the sensorimotor x stage---of development. During this stage, young subjects rely solely on sensory stimuli as the basis for all knowledge and fail to differentiate between themselves and their environment, thereby allowing for an immediate understanding of the world, but one that lacks any sense of self or individual autonomy. Chapter Three continues this developmental inquiry by treating the second, or semiotic stage, of development. During this stage, a subject learns first to identify the objects of perception with an abstract referent or sign and then to make associations between once-disparate sensations or ideas. Chapter Four continues the inquiry of semiotic development by examining the roles of socialization and formal education play in defining a subject's ontology. Lastly, Chapter Five completes the stages of childhood of development by examining the effects of adolescent desire and the onset of sexuality on ways of knowing and perceiving.