Page 1 |
Save page Remove page | Previous | 1 of 210 | Next |
|
small (250x250 max)
medium (500x500 max)
large ( > 500x500)
Full Resolution
All (PDF)
|
This page
All
Subset |
ORNAMENTAL GENTLEMEN: LITERARY CURIOSITIES AND
QUEER ROMANTICISMS
by
Michael Edward Robinson
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
May 2010
Copyright 2010 Michael Edward Robinson
Object Description
| Title | Ornamental gentlemen: literary curiosities and queer romanticisms |
| Author | Robinson, Michael Edward |
| Author email | merobins@usc.edu; merobi@gmail.com |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | English |
| School | College of Letters, Arts and Sciences |
| Date defended/completed | 2010-01-20 |
| Date submitted | 2010 |
| Restricted until | Unrestricted |
| Date published | 2010-03-05 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | Russett, Margaret |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Kincaid, James R. Accampo, Elinor |
| Abstract | The figure of the “bibliomaniacal” book collector with his “curious” malady – a “passion for collecting . . . that infects weak minds,” according to Isaac D’Israeli (1766-1848) – serves as the focus of this dissertation about nineteenth-century British poetry and prose. This extravagantly bookish figure haunts the open spaces and spontaneous overflows traditionally associated with the period’s conceptions of literature. As D’Israeli’s pointed diagnosis indicates, a disordered psychology is one element of this figure’s make-up. The symptoms of the book collector’s “book-disease,” as Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776-1847), a bibliographer and the inventor of the book-collecting society, refers to it, include a “mania” for a “curious” class of book: antique or otherwise auratic tomes marked by their externality to a burgeoning mass market for literary culture.; More than a psychological condition or cultural practice, the bibliomaniac’s mania also took the form of a discursive mode. Hence, this dissertation analyzes narratives of collecting as well as the figure of the book collector often central to them. In examining such narratives and the desires that drive them, I explore a cultural theory and practice not consumed by inspiration but inspired by consumption. The focus of the analysis ranges from the essays of Charles Lamb and Thomas De Quincey to the poetry of Thomas F. Dibdin and the illicit works of the Victorian forgers T. J. Wise and Henry Buxton Forman. I claim that the logic of book collecting instantiated the commodity form before it was theorized by Marx. But this fetish before the fetish, I also contend, was psychosexual as well as economic: the collector’s alarming “curiosity” reflected the status of bibliomania as a sexual neurosis. The bibliomaniac, like earlier collectors such as the seventeenth-century Italianate virtuoso, was a queer type.; The stigmatization of bibliomania was closely related, if not entirely reducible, to the appearance of mass culture in the century. Innovations in printing technology, decreases in the cost of producing books, and new institutions such as the lending library prompted a transformation of the way that Britons, many more of whom could now read, related to literature. The period also saw the appearance of the affordable anthology of British poetry, which helped sponsor the notion that British literature constituted a national heritage. Many literary representations of wealthy collectors like Richard Heber, whose collection of more than 250,000 volumes provided the materials for important anthologies of British poetry, cast them as privateers on this new cultural commons. Such collectors provoked no small amount of anxiety. The first chapter of the dissertation focuses on the archive of Thomas F. Dibdin housed at the Huntington Library. Dibdin, who styled himself an “ornamental Gentleman,” celebrated the world of rare book collecting in a camp style marked by ornate book design and compulsive typographical emphasis. The argument draws on a privately printed long poem entitled Bibliography: A Poem (1812), works such as The Bibliographical Decameron (1817), and Dibdin’scorrespondence. The chapter argues that both within and without bibliomaniacal circles,representations of collecting betray anxiety about the sexuality of the collector. I further claim that this anxiety intersected with concerns about collectors’ materialistic and acquisitive style of cultural consumption.; Far from being exclusive to the activities of collectors or bibliographers like Dibdin, the bibliomaniac’s mode of consumption was intimately related to the culture of so-called “minor” Romanticism. The book collector’s marginalized style of consumption had an ideological bedfellow in the works of professional writers for the magazines such as Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey and William Hazlitt. These writers self-consciously register their liminal position in British letters through representation of their love of literature. Scholars such as Deidre Lynch and Margaret Russett have drawn connections between such writers’ discourses of literature-love and their canonical minority. But, as the second chapter shows, their bookishness also exceeded the processes of professionalization and canonization in which they participated. The collecting practices of the bookish “hero” of London Magazine Charles Lamb and his Elia essays, including “Oxford in the Vacation,” serve as the foci of the second chapter. Here I argue that Lamb’s self-conception as a writer and his self-conscious preference for dog-eared volumes culled from London’s used bookshops (his “ragged regiment of book tatterdemalions”) played a role in his populist bohemianism. This personal and professional style reflected Lamb’s efforts to distinguish himself from the emerging middle-class professional writer and at the same time marked his distance from the leisured man of letters.; Lamb’s prototypically punk cultural practices find a parallel in those of another writer for the magazines, Thomas De Quincey, whose writings and style of collecting are the subject of the third chapter. Here the argument focuses on Confessions of an English Opium-eater and De Quincey’s Diary of 1803. I argue that the “opium-eater’s” allegedly unmatched consumption of opium (“I have indulged in it to an excess, not yet recorded of any other man” [De Quincey’s emphasis]) did in fact have a peer – of a different stripe. Such was the avidity of De Quincey’s collecting that at one point his library displaced his family from their home. But in the case of De Quincey, the fetishism of the literary was a theory as well as a practice. More specifically, De Quincey’s materialistic relations with literature coextend with the theoretical position on transcendentalism taken in the Confessions. Here, a picture of his youthful bibliomania – the surreptitious flight from Manchester Grammar School with a trunk of books – plays a central role in an ironic critique of both Kantian and Wordsworthian idealisms.; These articulations of opposition in the theory and praxis of bibliomania recurred in one of its legacies, the Victorian literary society. Instrumental in the construction of Romanticism during the Victorian period, clubs like Frederick J. Furnivall’s Shelley Society also continued the tradition of private printing begun by Dibdin’s collecting society, the Roxburghe Club. Two active members of several such clubs were the bibliographers and forgers Thomas J. Wise (1859-1937) and Henry (“Harry”) Buxton Forman (1842-1917). The pair’s activities gained notoriety when rare first editions of works of Victorian poetry linked to them, including a famous edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Songs from the Portuguese, were identified as forgeries. In the context of aqueer reading of their project and their legitimate as well as illegitimate works, I argue that Wise and Forman’s culture of imposture identifies Romanticism as an artifact of bibliomania.; This project on bibliomaniacal Romanticism and its afterlife makes two kinds of intervention, in literary history and queer studies. On the one hand, my research expands the present understanding of Romantic ideas about the material conditions of the making and partaking of art. On the other, in locating a bookish and queer aesthetic in the period, it develops a model for locating queerness within oppositional cultural practices in the nineteenth century. |
| Keyword | British Romanticism; Dibdin, Thomas Frognall; Lamb, Charles; De Quincey, Thomas; Wise, Thomas J.; Forman, Henry Buxton |
| Geographic subject (country) | Great Britain |
| Coverage era | Nineteenth Century |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Provenance | Electronically uploaded by the author |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m2863 |
| Rights | Robinson, Michael Edward |
| Repository name | Libraries, University of Southern California |
| Repository address | Los Angeles, California |
| Repository email | http://www.usc.edu/isd/libraries/services/ask_a_librarian/email/ |
| Filename | etd-Robinson-3496 |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume32/etd-Robinson-3496.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 1 |
| Full text | ORNAMENTAL GENTLEMEN: LITERARY CURIOSITIES AND QUEER ROMANTICISMS by Michael Edward Robinson A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) May 2010 Copyright 2010 Michael Edward Robinson |
Comments
Post a Comment for Page 1
