The Brandished Lyric: Form, Temporality and the Lyric I

Anna Finn
English
UC Irvine

This dissertation investigates the aesthetic effects of two related forms of standardization in the 19th century: the rise of brand culture and the standardization of time to Greenwich Mean Time.  Finn argues that the simultaneous innovation of the dramatic monologue as a lyric form reflects the alienating and paradoxically fragmenting effects of both modes of cultural standardization.  The result is a dramatization of the doubled modes of temporality and identity already inherent in the lyric as a simultaneously temporally transcendent, impersonal art object and a historically bound utterance with a particular speaker.  The recognition of the doubleness of “lyric time” and the “lyric I” reflects the shift in consciousness initiated by time standardization and by the consolidation of brand identities.  This project traces the aesthetic resonances of these two analogous cultural forces in the work of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot and Stevie Smith.  Thus, the project not only re-situates the “lyric” as a simultaneously historical and ideal form but also reads the technical innovations this realization incites across the Victorian-Modernist period divide.