Dyck, Denae2015-06-152015-06-152015-06-15http://hdl.handle.net/10222/56867Through her engagement with the philosophical, religious, and political debates of the nineteenth century, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (EBB) participates in the sage’s work of writing to create a more thoughtful and ethical society. This thesis analyzes the ways in which EBB’s Aurora Leigh (1856) portrays the poet and thus the sage not as the proponent of a single philosophy but as one who adopts many different forms of knowing. To conceptualize EBB’s revision of Victorian sage discourse, I adapt and amplify Wayne C. Booth’s theory of modal pluralism by drawing also from the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Balachandra Rajan, and John Ruskin. I argue that EBB presents the sage’s “double vision” as a pluralistic synaesthesia that gathers together various perceptual, emotional, and intellectual faculties (5.184). Accordingly, I consider also the consequences of this pluralistic vision, particularly in terms of the generous disposition and the unrealizable fullness it enjoins.enVictorian poetry