Abstract

This work begins with the premise that the English romantic poets believed in and valued the subject's unsatisfiable desire to know the objective world, rather than a static knowledge of the object. I show further that the work of Georges Bataille provides a valuable perspective from which to analyze romantic epistemology. Looking at texts that have a long history of epistemological criticism---William Blake's Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Percy Bysshe Shelley's Alastor---I propose radically different interpretations of the poems based on Bataille's ideas concerning the violent annihilation of subject and object, as well as the sacrifice of meaning represented by poetic language. In part, then, this study contributes to an understanding of romantic poetry as the heterogeneous communication of the anguished, isolate subject. ;Chapter One outlines Bataille's concepts---of desire, knowledge and knowledge, continuity and discontinuity, communication, and transgression, among others---which are then employed in my analyses of the romantic texts. In Chapter Two, I show how the figures of Thel and Oothoon represent the subject's willed experience with the objective world, and attempt to recover these female figures from centuries of critical dismissal. In Chapter Three, the Rime is read in terms of Bataillean transgression, defying interpretations that seek to close off the poem in a unified and unifying sphere of Christian sin and redemption. Finally, Chapter Four focuses on Alastor, arguing that the Poet finds knowledge "impossible," and so turns to erotic communication as a route to the blinding, ecstatic annihilation of non-knowledge