This dissertation examines the Romantic beginnings of nineteenth-century British liberalism. It argues that Romantic authors both helped to shape and attempted to resist liberalism while its politics were still inchoate. By shifting the question of Romantic politics away from the traditional radical/revolutionary and conservative/loyalist binary forward into the more ambiguous realm of early liberalism, the dissertation develops new readings of both first- and second-generation Romantic authors, including Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, and William Hazlitt.

This dissertation argues that periodical essayists in late Georgian and early Victorian England appropriated techniques from the theater to invent an empiric literary style that I call “theatric prose.” The central argument here is that Thomas De Quincey is an exemplar of theatric prose, who built a formative theory of literature underwritten by dramatic principles and instigated by a reproof of the Enlightenment principles that eventuated a crisis of legitimacy for rhetoric and theater in the nineteenth century. I demonstrate that De Quincey forges theater and rhetoric together into an anti-Enlightenment category that he calls “literature” and use De Quincey as a test case to determine the political power of this emergent mode of writing.

My first chapter sets the foundation for the dissertation by providing a comprehensive account of the dramatic principles that underwrite De Quincey’s general theory of literature. The second chapter starts the argument that his concept for literature, “the literature of power,” is an anti-Enlightenment category, by showing that it is built in large part out of a disapproval of the anti-rhetorical manner of language prescribed by Sir Francis Bacon. The third chapter continues by demonstrating that John Locke is also a crucial point of contention. The type of subjectivity associated with De Quinceyean literature is fundamentally opposed to that which is defined by British Empiricism. The final chapter concludes the dissertation by reading the central scene of De Quincey’s corpus as a scene of reading that promulgates literature of “theatric prose.” The first three chapters reconstitute his theory and situate it within its intellectual context. The last one studies how it is meant to persuade and circulate amongst others. These chapters discover that theater and literature, spectacle and reading, can be intimately entwined, and that, in fact, this spectacular mode of literature has been important to the history of British literature, philosophy, and culture.

This dissertation proposes what I am calling a zero ecology. Through a reading of four British Romantic poets—John Clare, William Wordsworth, William Blake, and Charlotte Smith—I argue that these writers refuse to permanently fix personhood, poetry, or place as the irrevocable center in a field, but instead temporarily locate each in a “vanishing point” position. Because each “vanishing point” concedes and defers to another “vanishing point,” a perpetually emergent, rotating latticework of relations emerges. These writers, therefore, assert a dynamic orientation between word and world that allows for moments of subjectivity without generating an overall anthropocentric view of the environment. My first chapter establishes the foundations for a zero ecology by questioning the critical impulse to center a biographically driven conception of John Clare that systemizes a reading across his poems yet collapses Clare against a landscape to impose a peculiar anthropocentricity. My second chapter asserts that William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” contorts a field of vision and problematizes the act of self-reflection through excessive deictic gestures, thereby pursuing an ontological inquiry of the self, the text, and the environment. My third chapter disputes critical conceptions that William Blake dismisses and reviles the natural world by exploring how his attentiveness to the concept of infinity and his excessive deployment of anthropomorphization generates oscillating conceptual interrelations between humans and nonhumans. Lastly, my fourth chapter explores how Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets interrogates absences in an environment with communicative presences that actively pursue questions of identity and nature that were once exiled to the periphery. By asserting that no single point of orientation can claim mastery over other points of orientation, namely a zero ecology that is fundamentally “pointless,” these four poets present urgent engagements with the environment and radically disrupt any reification of poem, place, or personhood.