Zubair, Sarah-Jean Jahan; (2025) The aesthetics of altered consciousness in English romantic texts, 1797-1820. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis examines the aesthetic techniques that three central English Romantic authors use to depict the relationship between mechanisms of literary transport and portrayals of consciousness. Through close readings of Romantic texts, I demonstrate different approaches by which authors dramatized this relationship across the Romantic period: William Blake’s devotional illustrative practices, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s experiments with poetic form, and John Keats’s ‘principle of beauty’ as an instrument of literary transport. I show that the Romantics used different aesthetic techniques to depict transport between different states of consciousness. In doing so, they identify ways in which aesthetic objects and techniques can be used to represent different modes of consciousness, including religious contemplation through illustration (Blake); using disturbed sleep to synthesise new poetic forms (Coleridge); and proposing a principle of beauty as a means of literary transport (Keats). Through my analyses of different types of aesthetic transport, I assert that Romantic poets used visual and written art forms to explore the relationship between perception, transport, and altered states of consciousness. I show that the force of these rich and varied literary approaches is evident in their lasting influence on subsequent generations of writers and artists. This thesis concludes that the Romantic fascination with consciousness forms a central component of Romantic literary history and resonates as a key influence on successive arts movements throughout the nineteenth century.

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