Romantic Citation and the Receding Future
Abstract
This dissertation reads citation in Romantic literature as an aporetic movement between present and past, whereby what is cited becomes the receding ground on which the present and future’s erosion is inscribed. Citation exceeds quotation in that it forwards a disastrous intertextuality that retroactively determines not only past texts but events, histories, objects, and genres as accelerants that overshadow and ghost the present with its own extinction. Against generative modes of intertextuality such as those of Kristeva and Bakhtin in which texts’ repetitions of other texts facilitates the open-ended overturning and transformation of prior writing, citation precipitates a no future. This no future of Romantic citation, inflected by the period’s geological insights into the earth’s history as layers of sedimented disasters and extinctions, registers anteriority as topographical depths whose pre-spent force attenuates futurity. Citation thus discloses the destructive feedback loop underlying the generation of “progress” or open-ended futures from the past. Chapter 1 examines how in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Byron’s re-collection of history’s ruins becomes a symptom of a post- and pre-post-Waterloo history entropically recycling itself and backdating its “end of history” further into the past and expansively across the globe. In chapter 2, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man cites literary texts as a form of déjà vu by which we discover ourselves as extinct proleptically in the literary past. Chapter 3 proposes that Percy Shelley’s re-cycled tropes and circular plots in the later poems encode the later poetry’s archaeological pull toward his corpus’s dark ground in the form of his early novel St. Irvyne and his other early Gothic texts that shadow his corpus with the specter of its exhaustion. And in chapter 4, Blake’s Jerusalem ends (Blake’s) history by re-citing his earlier works as if they were engines of apocalypse conspiratorially orientated toward Jerusalem’s abyssally predestined redemption, a volatile redemption that accelerates the burnout of Blake’s “System” rather than its survival into the future.