University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 12-2016 Sketches, Impressions and Confessions: Literature as Experiment in the Nineteenth Century Andrew Ragsdale Lallier University of Tennessee, Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the Aesthetics Commons, Continental Philosophy Commons, German Language and Literature Commons, and the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Lallier, Andrew Ragsdale, "Sketches, Impressions and Confessions: Literature as Experiment in the Nineteenth Century. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2016. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/4143 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Andrew Ragsdale Lallier entitled "Sketches, Impressions and Confessions: Literature as Experiment in the Nineteenth Century." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Nancy Henry, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Allen Dunn, Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud, Amy Billone, Sarah Eldridge Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) Sketches, Impressions and Confessions: Literature as Experiment in the Nineteenth Century A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Andrew Ragsdale Lallier December 2016 Copyright © 2016 by Andrew Lallier All rights reserved. ii Acknowledgments I would like to thank all of my committee members for their advice, work and forbearance throughout this project. I would particularly like to thank Nancy Henry for her unstinting aid in developing this and other projects, as well as in developing as a nineteenth-century literary scholar, and Allen Dunn for his ready conversations and the continuing guidance he has offered through the depths and heights of critical theory. Thanks are likewise due to Gerard Cohen- Vrignaud for his help in tracking and responding to large-scale critical currents, to Sarah Eldridge for her attempts to guide this project toward greater historical fidelity and precision, and to Gerard, Sarah and Amy Billone for helping to maintain my faith in the continuing relevance of Romanticism. Many thanks are owed to the University of Tennessee Humanities Center, whose generous support has enabled the completion of this dissertation, and whose resources and seminars have provided a wealth of occasions for intellectual growth. I would like to thank Mike Finn, whose conversations have helped me to more clearly express some of the obscure elements of this dissertation, and whose interest and enthusiasm is contagious. I would like to thank my parents their emotional support and the encouragement they have always provided for my education. My greatest thanks are due to my wife, whose faculties of sympathy, consolation and support have been frequently tried and never found wanting. This dissertation is dedicated to you, Allison, and to our son, Christopher. iii Abstract In this dissertation, I argue for the existence and critical relevance of a program of experimental literature in the long nineteenth century, developed in the aesthetics of German Romanticism and adapted in a set of texts by Thomas De Quincey, Charles Dickens and George Eliot. My introduction positions this argument in context of larger debates concerning form, theory and literary capacity, provides points of connection between these authors, and outlines the most prominent features of experimental literature. In the first chapter, I present an unorthodox reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, accompanied by a brief account of the literary-critical practice of the Athenaeum circle in Germany, as a means of establishing the philosophical values and theoretical underpinnings of the project of experimental literature. As Kant, Schlegel and cohort upheld ideals of beauty and literature grounded in unpredictable productivity and experimentation, De Quincey, Dickens and Eliot produced texts that seek to realize unanticipated connections in thought and sensation, following lines of association and speculation. Next, I argue that De Quincey’s depiction of Kant as producer of accumulative sentences and texts can provide a useful means of reading the literary experiments of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and for complicating critical accounts of De Quincey’s hostility to Kant. In the third chapter, I read Dickens’s less-known Sketches by Boz and Mudfog Papers as instances of social, scientific and speculative experimentation that deserve to be read in their own light, rather than as anticipations of his novels. In the last chapter, I again offer experimental literature as a means of theorizing literary significance in the eccentric works of a novelist, with Eliot’s “The Legend of Jubal” and Impressions of Theophrastus Such. Far from reproducing an image of a natural and sympathetic realist, in these texts Eliot pursues vagrant lines of literary speculation and cultivates critical difficulty. Taken together, these literary and philosophical texts present an ideal and practice of experimental literature that prioritizes speculation over didacticism, the play of thought and language over their habitual use, and the exercise of criticism, analysis and humor over the veneration of the received and familiar. iv Table of Contents Introduction: Experiments in Life and Literature ............................................................... 1 Chapter One: Aesthetic Problems and Literary Experiments ........................................... 36 Chapter Two: Opium as Philosophy ................................................................................. 73 Chapter Three: Boz’s Vital and Speculative Sketches and Papers ................................. 137 Chapter Four: The Artist and The Ecentric: Experimental Writing in “The Legend of Jubal” and Impressions of Theophrastus Such................................................................ 208 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 279 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 283 Vita .................................................................................................................................. 296 v Introduction: Experiments in Life and Literature In a much-quoted line from a letter to the physician Joseph Frank Payne in January of 1876, George Eliot, writing with a mixture of authority and apology, avowed that “my writing is simply a set of experiments in life.” This quote has generally been taken to refer to her novels, as in, for example, K. M. Newton’s use of it in his reading of Eliot as a philosophical novelist or in Bernard Paris’s revision of the line to the claim that “her novels were ‘simply a series of experiments in life’” (209). The immediate context of the letter, however, is Eliot responding to Payne on a subject arising from her long- form poem, “The Legend of Jubal.” In this exchange, Eliot adopts a tone often employed in her later life when dealing with ardent admirers, both instructing Payne and encouraging him to temper his expectations of receiving some great teaching or decisive revelation.1 Here, she redirects Payne’s request for a lesson or consolation on future life into a sketch of or outlines for an aesthetic-moral program, “an endeavour to see what our thought and emotion may be capable of – what stores of motive, actual or hinted as possible, give promise of a better after which we may strive.”2 After adverting to the need to keep hold of “gains from past revelations and discipline,” she continues: “I became more and more timid – with less daring to adopt any formula which does not get 1 For critical discussion of Eliot’s portrayal as Prophetess, oracle or “Sibyl” later in life, see David Carroll’s “George Eliot: The Sibyl of Mercia” (Studies in the Novel 15. 1 (Spring 1983): 10-25). This issue also intersects with work done by Charles LaPorte on the Prophetess figure in Victorian Poetry (see bibliography) and work on Eliot’s various admirers, male and female. 2 Payne’s letter discusses this primarily in terms of a question of hope, as he appears both to accept the reality of death and to be unable to concede his desire, and a more general desire (“but let me not put it as an individual wish … it is the longing of all freethinkers now that I am trying to express”), for some kind of futurity beyond death. This issue make sense given the poem at hand, which concludes with the death of Jubal’s body and the continued life of the art to which he gave birth. Payne introduces the subject “You have, I know, touched a very noble chord in ‘Jubal’ as to the function of death in human life” (216 n2). 1 itself clothed for me in some human