The Public Sphere of the Hunt Circle in Early Nineteenth
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THE PUBLIC SPHERE OF THE HUNT CIRCLE IN EARLY NINETEENTH- CENTURY POLITICS AND CULTURE A Dissertation by BYOUNG CHUN MIN Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 2010 Major Subject: English THE PUBLIC SPHERE OF THE HUNT CIRCLE IN EARLY NINETEENTH- CENTURY POLITICS AND CULTURE A Dissertation by BYOUNG CHUN MIN Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Approved by: Chair of Committee, Terence Hoagwood Committee Members, Susan Egenolf Mary Ann O’Farrell James M. Rosenheim Head of Department, Jimmie Killingsworth May 2010 Major Subject: English iii ABSTRACT The Public Sphere of the Hunt Circle in Early Nineteenth-Century Politics and Culture. (May 2010) Byoung Chun Min, B.A., Seoul National University; M.A., Seoul National University Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Terence Hoagwood This dissertation examines the Hunt circle’s public activities and its historical significance in terms of public-sphere theory proposed by Jürgen Harbermas. Recent studies on Romantic literature have attended to how Romantic writers’ literary practices were conditioned upon their contemporary history, as opposed to the traditional notion of Romanticism based on an affirmation of individual creativity. Although these studies meaningfully highlight the historicity inherent in seemingly individualistic Romantic texts, they have frequently failed to assess the way in which this historicity of Romantic texts is connected to Romantic writers’ own will to engage with public issues by placing too much emphasis on how history determines individuals’ activities. In this sense, the notion of public sphere offers a productive theoretical framework by which to read the historicity of Romantic literature without disavowing an individual writer’s role in historical proceedings, since it underscores a historical process in which a communal interaction between individuals constitutes a progress of history. By focusing on this iv significance of public-sphere theory, this dissertation suggests that the Hunt circle, whose members’ communal literary practices were aimed at achieving the public good in the tumultuous post-Napoleonic era, serves as a model of this process-based historical theorization. Chapter I examines the significance of public-sphere theory in assessing how the Hunt circle engaged in its contemporary history. Chapter II elucidates the nature of the public sphere that Leigh Hunt’s and his circle’s activities created and discusses the problems that this public sphere faced in the historical context of the early nineteenth century. Chapter III shows how the Hunt circle exposed a sense of anxiety and instability in the face of the commercialized literary public sphere by examining John Keats’s literary practices. Chapter IV highlights Percy Bysshe Shelley’s public ideal which aimed for a unified and inclusive public sphere beyond class boundaries and traces how this ideal was frustrated in the ensuing historical proceedings. Chapter V deals with the final phase of the Hunt circle and its disintegration by observing the ways in which Mary Shelley memorialized the Hunt circle for the feminized reading public of the Victorian period. By illuminating the nature of the Hunt circle’s activities for the public, this dissertation ultimately aims to reassess how literary intellectuals in the Romantic period struggled to sustain the traditional calling of men of letters in their contemporary public sphere. v DEDICATION For my parents, Chang-Dong Min and Ok-Ja Kim vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT .............................................................................................................. iii DEDICATION .......................................................................................................... v TABLE OF CONTENTS .......................................................................................... vi CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: LOCATING THE HUNT CIRCLE IN PUBLIC-SPHERE THEORY .............................................................. 1 II LEIGH HUNT AS A MAN OF LETTERS AND THE HUNT CIRCLE AS AN INTELLECTUAL PUBLIC SPHERE: THE FORMATION OF THE HUNT CIRCLE AND ITS HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE .................................................................................. 19 1. Hunt’s Activities through the Examiner and the Formation of the Hunt Circle ..................................................................... 22 2. Debates Surrounding Habermas’s Public-Sphere Theory ........ 33 3. The Notion of the Republic of Letters as the Basis of the Hunt Circle’s Publicity ............................................................. 47 4. Debates Surrounding the Issue of How to Characterize the Hunt Circle’s Publicity ............................................................. 80 5. The Difficulties Which the Hunt Circle’s Ideal Publicity Faced in Historical Proceedings ............................................... 96 III THE ANXIETY OF WRITING FOR THE PUBLIC: THE CASE OF JOHN KEATS ................................................................................ 104 1. Keats’s Early Project of Poetry and Its Frustration: Keats’s Poems of 1817 and Endymion and Tory Reviewers’ Responses to Them .................................................................. 109 2. Keats’s Ambivalent Attitude toward the Public: Keats’s Letters ....................................................................................... 131 3. Keats’s Complicated Position on the Issue of What Poetry Can Do for the World: The Fall of Hyperion and Lamia ......... 148 vii CHAPTER Page IV BEYOND AN INTELLECTUAL BOURGEOIS PUBLIC SPHERE: PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY’S NOTION OF IDEAL PUBLICITY AND ITS HISTORICAL LIMITATION ............................................. 170 1. Embodying an Inclusive and Open Public Sphere in Writings: Shelley’s “Hermit of Marlow” Pamphlets ............................... 175 2. Poets as the Unacknowledged Legislators of the World and the Public Sphere Which They Created: Laon and Cythna, Prometheus Unbound, and A Defence of Poetry ...................... 199 3. The Failure of Shelley’s Ideal Public Sphere: Two Receptions of Shelley’s Writings .................................... 218 V CONCLUSION: THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE HUNT CIRCLE AND MARY SHELLEY’S RETROSPECTIVE WRITINGS ON THE HUNT CIRCLE ............................................... 226 1. Mary Shelley’s Privatization of the Hunt Circle’s Public Activities: The Last Man.......................................................... 230 2. The Inflected Reception of the Hunt Circle’s Publicity in the Victorian Period: Mary Shelley’s Editorial Works.................. 241 WORKS CITED ........................................................................................................ 252 VITA ......................................................................................................................... 265 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: LOCATING THE HUNT CIRCLE IN PUBLIC- SPHERE THEORY This dissertation examines the historical significance of the Hunt circle (mostly, writers who belong to the so-called second-generation of Romanticism) by focusing on what kind of public sphere the Hunt circle members pursued and embodied through their activities for contemporary politics and culture and how this public sphere came to be disintegrated in the ensuing historical proceedings. As is well known, the notion of “public sphere” is proposed in Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, which historically locates a model of his theory of communicative action, and the basis of this notion is related to his lifelong effort to espouse the validity of Enlightenment Reason.1 Habermas, by attending to cultural gatherings of the eighteenth- century bourgeois societies in Britain, defines public sphere as a medium for open discussions in which private subjects gathered to practice their critical reason both through collaboration and competition. The proposition of public sphere as an overriding principle of a socio-cultural formation involves theoretical significance in several ways. This dissertation follows the style of the MLA Handbook. 1 In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas’s theory of public sphere is founded upon his study of specific cases of eighteenth-century England’s communal associations. For a general account of the principle of communicative action practiced in a society, see Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1984). 2 First, while this proposition places emphasis on individual actions, it never loses sight of the public dimension of which these individual actions become constitutive parts. Second, since it underscores the relational dynamics of communicative action, it does not preclude individual autonomy (along with individuals’ potential to effectuate social changes) in theorizing how a socio-cultural formation works.2 Most importantly, the role of reason in actualizing social justice, which has been downgraded and even annulled by those who attend to the class-oriented exclusivity and the instrumental reification generated from reason, can be recuperated by the assumption immanent in the notion of public sphere that communicative actions between individuals constitute the workings of 2 Recent