"Beyond the power of criticism": Vulnerability and invulnerability for Cowper, Wordsworth, and Austen (William Cowper, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen).

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

My dissertation takes part of its title from one of Francis Jeffrey's most notorious critical comments about Wordsworth: “the case of Mr. Wordsworth…is now manifestly hopeless, and we give up as altogether incurable, and beyond the power of criticism.” In fact, to move beyond the tyrannical power of criticism was just what Wordsworth and many later eighteenth century and early nineteenth century authors were aiming for. My dissertation examines the strategies and defenses, aggressions and evasions, with which writers in the period 1750–1830 negotiated the rising influence of literary criticism. I consider both criticism's increasing professionalization and dissemination and the attitudes taken towards it by imaginative authors in what <italic>Blackwood's Magazine</italic> declared “the most critical age ever the world produced.” While all writers in the period 1750–1820 respond in some way to the broad developments I describe, I focus my investigations on three authors—William Cowper, William Wordsworth, and Jane Austen—who have been traditionally considered especially detached from such concerns. I do so both in order to demonstrate the ubiquity of concern with criticism in the period and to explore the complex strategies with which unusually private and retiring writers confronted the threat of being exposed to public criticism. A focus on these authors' relation to criticism allows me to address various kinds of broader issues: writers' attitudes towards the concept of authorship, the nature of literary creativity, and authors' relation to their historical moment.