Abstract

In the "Preface" and poems of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth suggests that the contradictions and indeterminacies of reading mediate larger conflicts in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British culture. Wordsworth's model of reading draws upon and displaces empiricism's privileging of epistemological contradictions as the mediation of cultural conflicts. The dissertation, advised by Paul Fry and influenced by revisionary histories of philosophy and romanticism, begins with Hobbes's attempt to resolve or suppress cultural conflict by reconciling Aristotelian philosophy with scientific material determinism. Given the resulting, inadvertent dualism, Hobbes either ideologically overdetermines cultural dissension or identifies resistance with illusory phantasms within individuals. The second chapter considers how Locke and Hume use philosophical contradictions to maintain cultural order while preserving the individual's autonomy from material determinism. They internalize larger cultural conflicts as empiricism's epistemological contradictions which also limit philosophy's ability to determine the individual's thought. Thus empiricism's breakdown paradoxically makes it a premier form of cultural mediation. ;The second half of the dissertation charts Wordsworth's adaptation and displacement of philosophical mediation. Chapter three traces his claims in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads that poetry is both socially determined mimesis and the poet's autonomous creation. The attempt to reconcile those two models of poetry is explored through the Preface's discussion of the reader's pleasure and pain. The fourth chapter surveys how the poems of Lyrical Ballads displace epistemological contradictions with the reader's experience of poetic conflict, ambivalence, ambiguity and aporia. The collection shifts its portrait of the reader's mediation of cultural conflict from the apprehension of conflict between characters to the tragic recognition of the individual's inexpressible and internal conflict with his community