Making Waves : Queer Spatial Theory and Romanticism

Musk, Rebekah and Pearce, Lynne and Bainbridge, Simon (2023) Making Waves : Queer Spatial Theory and Romanticism. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This project generates a new understanding of queer spatial theory by queering conceptions of space itself and then applying this understanding to Romantic poetry. Space is often understood in gendered terms, and there are similarities in the way both spatiality and queerness are produced through discourses which seek to confine them within binary and taxonomic systems. Therefore, I look for textual spaces which defy easy categorisation and classification. These spaces and the characters which appear in them often present us with too much, too little, or a sense of the uncanny, all features which lend themselves to queer spatial analysis. By analysing the spatiality of the texts in this way, queer readings are generated, which often challenge the heteronormative surface narrative and provide different ways of engaging with already well-studied texts. Considering the Romantic period was one of both instability and possibility, its texts are full of the kinds of gaps and overlaps which lend themselves to my queer spatial analysis. This thesis is presented in two parts. The first part focuses on water in Byron’s ‘Turkish Tales’ and Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. Engaging with water from the macro to the molecular, it considers the sea and shoreline as sites of instability and possibility which constantly evade categorisation. There are also chapters on the disruptive potential of storms and the strange properties of the H2O molecule as both ice and water. This use of modern-day science to expose the instabilities of textual space continues into the second part of the thesis which focuses on light. Necessary for our spatial perception, light is considered mechanically in relation to orientation, reflection and the perception of colour; and culturally in terms of its association with revelation, inspiration and knowledge. The texts considered in relation to their lightscapes are Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’, Keats’s ‘Lamia’ and ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’, Landon’s ‘A History of the Lyre’, Hemans’s ‘Properzia Rossi’ and Shelley’s Alastor. Through creating and applying this new queer spatial theory, this thesis expands what is possible when talking about texts from the Romantic period and offers new ways of generating queer readings of apparently heteronormative texts.