Pointing The Limits Of Endurance: Punctuation, Time, And Nineteenth-Century British Poetry

Abstract

This dissertation examines the relationship between punctuation and experiences of extreme endurance in nineteenth-century British poetry. In particular, the dissertation examines the poetry of William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, and Christina G. Rossetti. All three poets were fascinated by how the limits of endurance also reveal the limits of the human. Because many marks of punctuation are inherently temporal, and because endurance is suffering experienced over time, punctuation provides these poets with a resource for presenting and imagining imperiled humanity as it sustains itself over time. The dissertation consists of three chapters, an introduction, and a brief conclusion. The introduction provides a historical and theoretical account of punctuation in general and in the nineteenth century. Each subsequent chapter demonstrates how one poet deploys punctuation marks-chiefly commas, semi-colons, colons, and fullstops-in a regular fashion across a body of works in order to achieve particular creative effects. The first chapter argues that punctuation allows Wordsworth to register the gulf and discord between his experience of time and the experience of time of those solitaries, who are exemplars of human endurance. The second chapter is on Tennyson. It argues that he lightens or makes heavy the punctuation in his poetry to reflect and reveal how his speakers experience time's passage-which is, in itself, to be endured. The third chapter, on Rossetti, argues that Rossetti patterns punctuation within poems, or in a poetic form (the sonnet), and then alters those patterns to reflect her shifting expectations, hopes, and anxieties about the imminence of God's judgment, and the dissolution and redemption of human time.