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Visionary Nonconformity: Miltonic Resonances and the Poetics of Religious Dissent in the Long Eighteenth Century Matthew Ickv Less

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Visionary Nonconformity: Miltonic Resonances and the Poetics of Religious Dissent in the Long Eighteenth Century Matthew Ickv Less Duquesne University Duquesne Scholarship Collection Electronic Theses and Dissertations Fall 2015 Visionary Nonconformity: Miltonic Resonances and the Poetics of Religious Dissent in the Long Eighteenth Century Matthew ickV less Follow this and additional works at: https://dsc.duq.edu/etd Recommended Citation Vickless, M. (2015). Visionary Nonconformity: Miltonic Resonances and the Poetics of Religious Dissent in the Long Eighteenth Century (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/1311 This Immediate Access is brought to you for free and open access by Duquesne Scholarship Collection. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Duquesne Scholarship Collection. For more information, please contact [email protected]. VISIONARY NONCONFORMITY: MILTONIC RESONANCES AND THE POETICS OF RELIGIOUS DISSENT IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY A Dissertation Submitted to the McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts Duquesne University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Matthew Vickless December 2015 Copyright by Matthew Vickless 2015 VISIONARY NONCONFORMITY: MILTONIC RESONANCES AND THE POETICS OF RELIGIOUS DISSENT IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY By Matthew Vickless Approved November 3, 2015 _____________________________ _____________________________ Daniel P. Watkins, Ph.D. Laura Engel, Ph.D. Professor of English Emeritus Associate Professor of English (Dissertation Director) (Committee Member) _____________________________ _____________________________ Danielle A. St. Hilaire, Ph.D.. Greg Barnhisel, Ph.D. Associate Professor of English Professor of English (Committee Member) (Chair, Department of English) _____________________________ James Swindal, Ph.D. Dean, McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts Professor of Philosophy iii ABSTRACT VISIONARY NONCONFORMITY: MILTONIC RESONANCES AND THE POETICS OF RELIGIOUS DISSENT IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY By Matthew Vickless December 2015 Dissertation Supervised by Dr. Daniel P. Watkins In the wake of three decades of critical recovery work, which has restored poems by women and working-class poets to the British canon, critic Joseph Wittreich’s groundbreaking critical model about visionary poetics now may be enhanced in order to reveal a more expansive and fluid Miltonic presence, particularly within much eighteenth-century visionary verse. This dissertation applies and at times refocuses Wittreich to achieve a clearer picture of how visionary poetry developed in Britain after Milton, accounting for key poetic visions by several women poets who wrote during the long eighteenth century. The visionary poetics of Jane Barker, Elizabeth Rowe, Mary Leapor, and Anna Barbauld are considered in an intertextual and cultural framework to suggest that the visionary mode, especially as practiced by these women poets, supplements political agency and elides barriers between the public and the private iv spheres. The visionary poetics studied in this dissertation generated a hermeneutic of engagement that allowed otherwise disenfranchised women to politicize a private religious consciousness while at the same time underscoring the public nature of religion in the long eighteenth century. v DEDICATION To Melissa A. Wehler, Ph.D. and Cillian Benedict Wehler Vickless, with all my love. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iv Dedication .......................................................................................................................... vi Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: The Visionary Poetics of Katherine Barker’s Medical Poetry ................... 25 Chapter Two: Elizabeth Singer Rowe and the Politics of Biblical Paraphrase ................ 62 Chapter Three: Mary Leapor’s “Crumble Hall” as Visionary Text .................................. 98 Chapter Four: Barbauld’s “Corsica” and the Dissenting Visionary Tradition ............... 132 Epilogue: A Survey of the Term Visionary in Late Eighteenth-Century British Public Discourse......................................................................................................................... 182 Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 220 vii Introduction As a specialized area of scholarship confined largely to Milton studies, Romanticism studies, or a hybrid of both, critical statements on visionary poetics have addressed poetry that seeks to alter human consciousness on a grand scale. Such scholarship largely has been the result of questioning how subsequent poets were influenced by Milton’s seminal visionary works, especially Lycidas, Paradise Lost, and Samson Agonistes, paying particular attention to the ways that poetry produced under Miltonic influence revises or corrects key parts of Milton’s own designs for modifying perception and thereby altering consciousness. The essays collected in Joseph Anthony Wittreich Jr.’s seminal Milton and the Line of Vision (1975) established a successful critical model for studying visionary poetry. By focusing on a circumscribed “line of vision,” comprised of male canonical poets from Edmund Spenser to Wallace Stevens, Wittreich’s collection and subsequent studies of visionary poetics indebted to Wittreich have established Milton’s primacy within the genre. In the wake of three decades of critical recovery work, which has restored poems by women and working-class poets to the British canon, Wittreich’s groundbreaking model now may be enhanced in order to reveal a more expansive and fluid Miltonic presence, particularly within much eighteenth-century visionary verse. This dissertation applies and at times refocuses Wittreich to achieve a clearer picture of how visionary poetry developed in Britain after Milton. To do so, it is necessary to account for key poetic visions by several women poets who wrote during the long eighteenth century, because the visionary mode, especially as practiced by several lesser-known women poets, supplements political agency and elides barriers between the public and the private spheres. The visionary poetics studied in this dissertation generated a hermeneutic of engagement that allowed otherwise disenfranchised women to politicize a private religious consciousness while at the 1 same time underscoring the public nature of religion in the long eighteenth century. Close reading of visionary poems by Jane Barker, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Mary Leapor, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld (contextualized against a culminating survey of usage of the term visionary in late eighteenth-century public discourse) augments our view of the complex and multivalent visionary poetics being practiced in Britain during the eighteenth century—well before the appearance of Romantic visionary poetry in the 1790s, which comprised the subject of Wittreich’s early foundational scholarship. Likewise, considerable study has been given to millenarianism and millennialism in the early modern period, as well as the resurgence of such movements in the revolutionary years of the later eighteenth century. Considerably less scholarship has been dedicated to prophecy as a discrete cultural and social discourse, an important signifier of millenarian and millennial behavior that was nevertheless governed by its own set of practices and engaged with its own traditions, specifically as a biblical hermeneutic. The scholar who has carried this line of inquiry through the cultural history of the eighteenth century is Susan Juster, whose cultural history serves to ground Wittreich’s literary-critical framework within wider cultural phenomena, political behaviors, and religious practices. I engage with Juster’s principle thesis, that “at once quintessentially modern and thoroughly steeped in Old Testament values, prophets offer an ideal vantage point from which to survey the political, cultural, and intellectual transformations of the ‘age of revolution’” (17), tightening its focus on key moments of literary production by women in the pre-revolutionary period (1688-1773). It is important to distinguish the social practice Juster studies from the literary mode that constituted one manifestation of the practice. Both have been identified using the same term, prophecy. For the sake of clarity, the term visionary poetics will mostly refer to the latter, the 2 literary mode, while I try to reserve the term prophecy for referring to the broader practice. It is not always possible to preserve this distinction, in large part because the literary critic with whom I carry on a sustained conversation, Wittreich, uses the terms visionary poetics to identify how the literary mode prophecy is performed by poets like Milton and Blake. If prophecy is a literary mode, then it is important to understand that mode as participating in a larger cultural discourse. Here, I follow Juster’s definition: “In keeping with the permissive categorization of the time, I use the term ‘prophecy’ in its broadest possible meaning, to encompass all the shades of millennial interpretation from simple fortune-telling to formalized theories of Christ’s return and the end of time. The common element is the conceit that biblical references and current events form
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