A Mute Pleasure: Novelistic Poetics in the Nineteenth-Century

Author

Ryan Everitt, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkFollow

Date of Degree

9-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

English

Advisor

Talia Schaffer

Committee Members

Tanya Agathocleous

Caroline Reitz

Subject Categories

Aesthetics | Literature in English, British Isles | Reading and Language

Keywords

Nineteenth-century British novel, phenomenology of reading, poetics, affect theory, realism, novel theory

Abstract

Through special attention to the non-narrative, descriptive, lyrical, or even boring passages that interrupt the story, this dissertation explores what happens when the nineteenth-century British novel envelops experiences that were traditionally (or since Romanticism) in the domain of poetry: longings for escape, exhilarating affects of freedom, opaque moments of revelation. In most cases, I characterize the novel discourse as representing a prosaic consciousness that wrestles with its more visceral yet vital “other,” poetic consciousness. To articulate how poetry survives within novelistic discourse, this dissertation is organized around sets of opposing terms, whose unresolved tension becomes the basis of my analysis of a very small, but I think representative, selection of nineteenth-century novels. As realist novels privilege prosaic experience and marginalize poetic experience, they institute a play of textual difference—one that is expressed by the differences we make between walking and wandering (chapter 1), knowing and unknowing (chapter 2), and development and transformation (chapter 3).

Recommended Citation

Everitt, Ryan, "A Mute Pleasure: Novelistic Poetics in the Nineteenth-Century" (2024). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5927