Dissertation Prospectus: Round 1

It's September again, and that means the "beginning of the year" has arrived. Time for new binders, new time-tables, new reading lists and new goals. Since I am planning on going to Germany in February for a six-month exchange, I have a time limit for reaching my goals, the biggest of which is to be ABD (all but dissertation) by January.

As I am waiting to find out about by comprehensive exam results, [I passed!!] I am trying to create some meaningful connections to structure the next step in the ol' Humanities PhD, which is the dissertation prospectus. One of my goals is to have a draft of my prospectus completed by Sept 15th. Throughout the comps-writing-proooooccccesssssse I have become quite attached to some main themes and ideas, but it's awfully difficult to create a cohesive thesis out of them.

Here are the main ideas I am interested in pursuing:

-The poorly-received or "pedestrian" (what Keats would call "smokeable") poetry of Keats, W. Wordsworth, P.B. Shelley and Barbauld. Especially poems that use gothic conventions, like "Isobel and the Pot of Basil," "The Witch of Atlas," "The Vail of Esthwait," or else ones that theorize non-standard aesthetic responses, like Barbauld's writings on the pleasure of terror.

-The relationships between the gothic (as a genre but mostly as a thematics/aesthetic), over-the-top aesthetic stimulation, and "bad" poetry-- because novels were often disparaged during the period for being entertainment rather than tools for the betterment of the human mind and spirit-- can gothically-influenced poetry stand between these frames of mind/intentions?

Of course, there are so many questions related to this...

-In the Romantic literary marketplace, do gothic novels do the work of increasing the reader's emotional load to the point where the limit is pushed out and increased (so the gothic becomes conventional--gothic conventions!), or else breaks and is thereby seen as a failure? Do the poets use gothic conventions in their works before or after they were conventional?

-What does this desire for intense and uncomfortable, but also thrilling and pleasurable, aesthetic stimulation tell us about Romantic self-fashioning or the Romantic imagination?

-Is there a historical connection to be made between context (political breakdown, revolution, economic uncertainty, war at a distance) and an aesthetics that shocks and tantalizes?