The marvelous and the sublime: The aesthetics of nineteenth-century German and British women poets, Annette von Droste-Huelshoff and Christina Rossetti.

The dissertation demonstrates that British and German women poets of the nineteenth century transformed the marvelous (das Wunderbare), which originally described the miraculous aspects of fairy lore, into an aesthetic device (Kunstmittel) that continued and reconfigured diverse aesthetic categories and paradigms, such as the sublime and the beautiful. I show that the sublime, which at first seems to have disappeared from Victorian debates about art, actually survives within the circumference of the marvelous in nineteenth-century women's verse. I therefore conclude that the poetry written by such key figures as Annette von Droste-Hulshoff and Christina Rossetti illustrates the erroneousness of twentieth-century feminist thinking which asserts that Victorian women failed to contribute to the conception of nineteenth-century aesthetics. My assumptions about Victorian women's participation in the poetological discourse also disputes the notion that British and German women's verse of this period attests solely to social self-effacement. Instead, I suggest that Droste-Hulshoff and Rossetti employed poetry in order to extend the open fight for political equality to the confines of the aesthetic debate. These poets reinvented the female poetic persona so that she gained access not only to the aesthetic domain of feminine decorum, but also to that of the male sublime. In this manner, she both appropriated and criticized poetic genres governed by allegorical models of elation and transcendence, such as the quest ballad and the epic. I conclude that women poets insisted on the dispersal of poetic selfhood not for social reasons, but for the purposes of revising the Victorian aesthetic. The first chapter shows how the ambiguity and arbitrariness inherent in sublime aesthetics is at once exposed and celebrated in the poetry of nineteenth-century women. The second chapter considers how the marvelous in Victorian women's verse resists poetological definition and liberates their work from traditional concerns about the problem of artistic representation. Finally, the third chapter discovers in their verse an affinity between the marvelous and the ironic. I analyze this inter-infusion as evidence that each poet reshaped the marvelous into the modern modes of the fantastic and uncanny.Ph.D.English literatureGerman literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsSocial SciencesWomen's studiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/130290/2/9722026.pd