Daemonic allure: material experiences in nineteenth-century American poetry.

• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20409537

This dissertation examines a neglected "proto-aesthetic" strain of nineteenth-century American poetry. The major authors of this project - John Neal, Margaret Fuller, Adah Isaacs Menken, and Sidney Lanier - articulate both an attraction to nature and an awareness of how the material world exceeds human powers of conceptualization. Their work is the core of a tradition of American poetry in which the contemplation of nature results in ambivalent and ephemeral experiences of attraction while the asymmetry between material nature and the human mind is foregrounded. This tradition represents a departure from the Romantic organicist aesthetics of Transcendentalism and in tracing this poetic current, Daemonic Allure offers an alternative history of post-Kantian American aesthetics. I examine the relationship articulated by these writers between the a-conceptual contemplation of nature and experiences of autonomy from aesthetic consensus. In contrast to Kantian and post-Kantian aesthetic theory, these poets imagine encounters with the alterity of nature that are unshareable. The a-conceptual reflective encounter with nature grounds not a disinterested subject position and model for universal experience (as it does for Kant), but a mode of a-social experience, freed from aesthetic theory's demand for assent. I argue that this a-social nature-aesthetic has been largely invisible to Americanists and Romantic scholars because of the prevailing influence of organicist and post-organicist models for nature-representation. In the counter-Romantic poetry examined in Daemonic Allure, the unmooring of the aesthetic contemplation of nature from the demand for social agreement has two consequences. Nature's innate nonhuman value becomes visible and a critique of the naturalization of social relations is instigated.--Author's abstract