| dc.description | The present study undertakes a reconceptualization of the theoretical and experiential framework of the Romantic sublime by shifting the focus from Burkean and Kantian prescriptions of natural vastness and grandeur to the narrower but no less wondrous spaces, objects and experiences of everyday life. This shift is defined in general terms as a descent from mountaintops to an encounter, in William Blake's terms, with "a World in a Grain of Sand." Numinous experiences of everyday reality pervade the literature of the period, particularly the work of women writers such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Joanna Baillie, Dorothy Wordsworth, Anne Grant and Felicia Hemans; male working-class poets such as Robert Burns and John Clare; and, local (and loco-descriptive) writers such as William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, John Thelwall, William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt and Thomas De Quincey. Whether by directing their gaze to the immediately perceptible world around them or else by turning with scrupulous care to the concealed wonders of the natural world, to solitary flowers, nests and even insects, these writers pierce what Coleridge calls "the film of familiarity" and evoke the visionary in the ostensibly dreary and common. Their simultaneously microscopic and telescopic perspective, by revitalizing a connection with the everyday, yields not only astonishment but also solace, comfort and a sense of community. Indeed, unlike the mountaintop sublime of Burke and Kant which culminates in self-apotheosis, the quotidian sublime is a consolatory experience that grounds and centers the subject in the material reality of everyday life. In order to define this inherently amorphous and subsumptive category called "everyday life," I draw upon two main theoretical threads: the first, based on the phenomenological poetics of Gaston Bachelard, serves to elucidate the depth and diversity of everyday household space; the second, comprising the work of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, defines the generative potential, what de Certeau glosses as the "everyday creativity," of some of the most basic human activities such as walking, reading and washing, to name but a few. The role of the everyday in Romantic literature has in recent years received greater scholarly attention, particularly from critics dissatisfied with the perpetuation of what Karina Williamson characterizes as a "debased Romanticism which rules there is a category of experience and expression which is poetic and all the rest is ordinary and inadmissible." The present study serves to map the intersections between these categories of experience and expression, between the sublime and the quotidian, and thereby to challenge our assumptions about the aesthetic value of the everyday not only in the Romantic period but also in our own. | en_US |
