The narrative sublime : strategies of lyric-narrative synthesis in Byron, Shelley, Keats and Poe

Abstract

This thesis adapts a narratological lens to analyze the fluidity of lyricity and narrativity within transgeneric Romantic texts, thereby complicating the default dichotomy between lyric and narrative genres. For the later Romantics, the generic division between narratives and the lyric was a formal opportunity to represent the sublime through the subtextual synthesis of lyricity and narrativity—the essential modal qualities of the respective genres. Narrativity is constructed alongside lyricity in forms that are more readily recognizable as non-narrative. Beyond a superficial combination of lyric and narrative elements, the poets’ textual constructions of transgenericity reflect the centrality of the sublime in informing the generic transcendence in their compositions.

Variously constructed in the transgeneric texts, the sublime—I argue—extends beyond its common association with lyricity into narrativity; the co-existence of lyricity and narrativity is structurally and thematically suggestive of regenerative creativity. The significance of this research lies in its bridging of Romantic and narrative studies to situate Romantic transgenericity in the elusive aesthetic context of the sublime.

The chapters trace the essential aspects of narrativity—sequentiality (plot) and mediacy (narration)—within lyric verse and prose forms, and how narrativity can be embedded into lyricity to explicate or compound thematic significance. Chapter I, short-titled “Ambits”, evaluates the narratological concept of boundaries for establishing narrative (anti)climax in Lord Byron’s Manfred: A Dramatic Poem, “The Dream” and “Darkness”. The poet’s paradoxical deployments of lyricity at the (anti)climactic moments of non-cognition consciously run against the typical Wordsworthian construction of sublime epiphany. Chapter II, “Ambling”, examines lyric-narrative mediacy in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude, in which the theme of sublime music (as a symbol of poetry) manifests as imagined songs and the voice(s) of the narrating poet. Lyric temporality is organized within and without the mythological hierarchy of the narrative frame not only to generate the lyric-narrative climax, but also to structurally represent Shelley’s idealism of a supernatural transcendence of sublime poetry. Chapter III, “Ambient Ambiguity”, pinpoints lyric-narrative transgenericity as a structural manifestation of synesthesia which represents perceptual ambiguity and embodies the sublime’s dialectical tension in John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “Silence – A Fable”. The formally disparate texts share a similar construction of thematic transgenericity and align with the writers’ conceptions of poetry’s ideal function and the mental flexibility needed to realize it. The thesis summarizes transgenericity as exemplifying a functional reworking of lyric-narrative opposition within the context of Romanticism.