| dc.description | This thesis is a study of the use of comic conventions in selected literature of the Romantic period, focusing on techniques by which writers subvert or call attention to the arbitrariness of those conventions even while continuing to draw upon them to structure their work. The study begins with a survey of some of the ideas about comedy underlying the writing of that era, then turns to a close reading of individual works. The first section of my argument looks at novels which stress the limitations imposed by working within established conventions and begins with a discussion of Robert Bage's Hermsprong, a book in which the narrator fails to recongnize his own entrapment by the coventions of comic fiction that he mocks. Self-consciousness about that entrapment does not enable a narrator to escape it, however, as I suggest in a chapter focusing on Byron's Don Juan. Instead, the limitations imposed by conventions can become a subject for comedy in their own right. In the last two chapters, I turn to writers with very different techniques for working beyond those limitations--Blake and Austen. By looking at some of Blake's early sketches--particularly the prose fragment "An Island in the Moon"--as well as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, I attempt to demonstrate that he is parodying and recreating several familiar comic genres in his own idiom. Austen's novels, while much less flamboyant, nonetheless engage in a sustained critical examination of fictional conventions as well, one which suggests the extent to which constrictions are imposed by following any single established pattern of comedy. My discussion of her work begins by looking at the Juvenilia, but concentrates on Mansfield Park and its two opposed and rather unsatisfactory heroines. Yet even while examining and criticizing fictional patterns established by her predecessors, Austen provides a model for future authors, and in my conclusion I discuss the ways in which the literature in this study is related to later comic writing. | en_US |
