| dc.description.abstract | This doctoral thesis aims to examine how certain sexual images and
motifs commonly deemed “obscene” are represented as a unique aesthetic
phenomenon in the works of English Romantic poets, William Blake, Percy
Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. It can be observed that sexual desire
becomes an emblem that the Romantics use to rebel against political and
religious oppression and to establish individual subjectivity free from the
restraint of scientific rationalism, further accessing a transcendental state of
the “Poetic Genius.” Departing from the long-established readings of sexual
desire in the Romantic poetry, this thesis first situates the idea of obscenity in
the historical contexts of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to
reconceptualise it as an alternative form of aesthetics of self-annihilation
correlated with the sublime. In the main chapters, by exploring the oft-ignored
dark and violent aspects of eroticism in Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of
Albion and Milton, Shelley’s The Cenci and Laon and Cythna, and Keats’s
“Isabella” and “The Eve of St. Agnes,” I argue that “obscenity” emerge in
English Romanticism as a unique aesthetic phenomenon of self-annihilation,
particularly empowered in the experiences of sex, religious ecstasy, and
poetic creation itself. The research results of this thesis delineate that in the
works of these poets, religion, art, and eroticism form an essential trinity in
the human psyche that constantly seeks to build, reshape, escape from, and
eventually destroy existing identities. It also epitomises the desire to go
beyond the status quo and the ordinary experience of limited selfhood. An
examination of this heterogeneous trinity provides an alternative angle to
approach other canonised literary works of English Romanticism and explore
within them the elements that are “less canonised” and “obscene.”
Furthermore, it resonates with the recent studies that have highlighted the
material and somatic aspects in the Romantic poets and their works. | en |
