Copyright by Stephanie Suzanne Rosen 2015 The Dissertation Committee for Stephanie Suzanne Rosen certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Encoding Embodiment: Poetry as a Victorian Science Committee: ____________________________________ Ann Cvetkovich, Co-Supervisor ____________________________________ E. Allen MacDuffie, Co-Supervisor ____________________________________ Lisa L. Moore ____________________________________ Samuel Baker ____________________________________ Adela Pinch Encoding Embodiment: Poetry as a Victorian Science by Stephanie Suzanne Rosen, B.A.; M. A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2015 Acknowledgements During the course of this project I received support from many people and institutions. The writing of this dissertation was made possible with the generous support of the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, the Maureen Decherd Fellowship, and The University of Texas Graduate School Named Continuing Dissertation Fellowship. Archival research for this project was assisted by Fiona Godber at the Balliol College Archives, Oxford University, and Sarah Walpole at the Royal Anthropological Institute, London. The digital component of this project was developed at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute thanks to a University of Victoria Tuition Scholarship, at the Taking TEI Further Workshop thanks to a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant, and with the insight and expertise of Yanyi Lu. At my various institutions I benefitted from brilliant leaders, colleagues, and students. Darcy Buerkle, Lara Matta, Kerry Spitzer, Sujata Moorti, Loretta Ross, and Nayiree Roubinian made my time at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center extremely rewarding. Chris O y P, Sara Saylor, Emily Bloom, Dustin Stewart, Lisa Gulesserian, and Pearl Brilmyer made pursuing a PhD at the University of Texas an intellectual delight. Rae and Cat taught me much in the classroom. My dissertation committee was a rare, wonderful combination that collectively provided all the support I required. Thanks to Sam Baker for his legendary seminars, to Adela Pinch for her excellent scholarship, to Lisa Moore iv for her generous mentorship, Allen MacDuffie for his exacting expectations, and to Ann Cvetkovich for everything. I also wish to thank the teachers who prepared and encouraged me long before this project began: Patricia and Calvin Rosen, Marjorie Levinson, David Halperin, Elizabeth Anderson, and Patsy Yaeger. Finally I wish to thank Lokeilani Kaimana for supporting me every day of this project. v Encoding Embodiment: Poetry as a Victorian Science by Stephanie Suzanne Rosen, PhD The University of Texas at Austin, 2015 SUPERVISOR: Ann Cvetkovich SUPERVISOR: E. Allen MacDuffie This dissertation is a study of poetry by major nineteenth-century British writers—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Algernon Charles Swinburne—in the context of major nineteenth-century scientific questions. I analyze how these poets were intellectually connected to contemporary discussions of scientific epistemology, human sensation, and species evolution, respectively, and how their innovations in poetic form constituted one mode of investigating such phenomena. My close readings of major poems—Browning’s “An Essay on Mind,” Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” and Swinburne’s “Hermaphroditus”—draw from formalist methods that are attentive to historical forces, and cultural studies methods that are attentive to materiality, thus developing a practice of reading poetry as the product of experimental making. This approach is extended in the companion digital project to this study: an online edition of Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” in which users may explore the poem’s irregular rhyme in an interactive interface. This study offers new vi methods and new texts to scholarship of the mutual influence of Victorian science and literature. It furthermore traces connections between the scientific theories in Victorian poetry and those in more recent critical theory, including especially feminist materialisms, affect theory, and transgender studies. Chapter One reads Browning’s understudied 1826 epic poem “An Essay on Mind” to reframe her career-long engagement with debates on scientific method and her particular critiques of scientific materialism. Chapter Two argues that Rossetti’s 1861 “Goblin Market” uses irregular rhyming patterns to study the ways in which the relative orientations of its characters may affect each other’s experience, a topic of interest to her as a religious educator. Chapter Three argues that Swinburne’s poetry plays with words as historically evolved forms capable of unpredictable change and that his sonnet sequence “Hermaphroditus” recognizes the body as capable of similar transformations. Chapter Four examines the potential for poetic form to inform the coding practices used to translate print poetry into digital editions, providing theoretical context for my interactive edition of “Goblin Market.” vii Table of Contents Introduction: Poetry as a Victorian Science . 1 Chapter One: Poetic Method: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Philosophy of Science . 24 I. An Essay on Mind . .27 II. Form . 46 Chapter Two: Rhymes With: Christina Rossetti’s Sensationalism . 57 I. Rhyme and Sensation . .61 II. Goblin Market . 72 III. Conclusion . 94 Chapter Three: Sexual Evolutionary: Algernon Swinburne’s Trans Poetics . .100 I. Evolutionary Poetics . 103 II. Victorian Hermaphroditism . .112 III. Swinburne’s “Hermaphroditus” . 120 IV. Trans Theory . 132 V. An Intellectual Hermaphrodite . 137 Chapter Four: Victorian Poetry, New Media . .146 I. Victorian Studies, New Media . 150 II. Rossetti by Rhyme: Project Description . 156 III. Conclusions . 173 Appendix: Abbreviations used in Citations . .176 Bibliography . .177 viii Introduction Poetry as a Victorian Science “Poiesis means making,” the website for the Centre for Expanded Poetics reminds visitors, in a minimal Bauhaus font over a black-and-white photograph of Richard Serra’s “Torqued Ellipse” in the shadows of a coral tree. The Centre for Expanded Poetics (CEP) is a newly funded “creative research laboratory for the interdisciplinary study of structure, form, and fabrication” that combines the study of poetics with the practices of science, architecture and cinema (N. Brown). Its emphasis on “making,” in the age of the digital humanities, makes a by now familiar claim to authority by way of practical experience,1 but is also emblematic of a search for new methods across several humanities and social science disciplines that might include, for example, creative non-fiction and non- representational theory.2 Its emphasis on collaborations with biology, physics, chemistry, metrology, and materials science is indicative of a turn in critical theory, beyond cultural and discursive meanings, to ecological, organic and physical significance in a variety of fields—a turn known under the collective name of “new materialism.” And its use of the term “poiesis” calls on a long tradition of critical aesthetic making through the Greek word ποίησις as theorized by Aristotle in opposition to techne/doing, and elaborated by 1 For the argument that one must be a “maker” to be a digital humanist, see for example Stephen Ramsay, “On Building” and “Who’s In”; for a critique of this claim see Debbie Chachra, “Why I am not a Maker.” 2 For example, creative work by Saidiya Hartman, Omi’seke Natasha Tinsley; Vannini, Non- Representational Methodologies, and Thrift, Non-representational theory. 1 Heidegger in the special sense of “bringing forth” a work of art with respect for inherent qualities of its material.3 Yet it also harkens back to a mid nineteenth- century moment of defining poetry. The Oxford English Dictionary locates the first use, in English, of poiesis in an 1850 article by David Masson on William Wordsworth, published shortly after the former Poet Laureate’s passing. In that essay, Masson forces poiesis into English to give language to the aesthetic action of Coleridge’s concept of “Imagination,” originally defined as an “essentially vital” process of creation which “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate,” and “struggles to idealize and to unify” (Coleridge 488-9). Masson rewrites Imagination as “Creative Energy,” an action that is: akin (with reverence be it spoken) to the operation of that original cosmic power at whose fiat the atoms and the elements sprang first together. A certain accumulation of material, a certain assemblage of impressions, or mental objects, being supplied by the consciousness, and lying there ready, it is the part of this faculty to discharge into them a portion self that shall fuse them into a living whole, capable of being contemplated with pleasure. This—the poiesis or creation of new unities, the information of mere knowledge with somewhat of the spirit of the knower, the incorporation of diverse impressions and recollections by the combining flash of a specific mental act—is essentially the function of the imagination. (Essays 366-67) In this Victorian revision of Coleridge, the work of Imagination is not a vitalist process of growth but rather work—an energetic act of shaping matter (“elements,” “atoms”) with force (“power,” “discharge”). Poiesis, in Masson, is the process of working matter into shape that produces form, a process that