Charlotte Smith's Lyric Forms

This dissertation focuses on the historical and rhetorical constructions of modern lyric theory which emerge out of the Romantic period. I illustrate how, though modern lyric theory locates much of its foundational material in the critics and writers of the nineteenth century, it has not yet approached a wider variety of writers who were active in this period, especially women writers. I cite a specific example in the early Romantic writer Charlotte Turner Smith who reimagines the emergent lyric as a network in which the roles of speaker, auditor, and audience can be creatively blurred. Though Smith appears to work within definitions of the lyric, in both her poetry and her novels, Smith deliberately frames and reframes the lyric’s foundational relationship between the reader, the speaker, and the audience. In turn, Smith’s voice redefines the modern lyric not simply as an intimate encounter between reader and speaker, but instead a constantly negotiating set of encounters which allows every figure in the relationship to impact the text in important ways. This project argues for a revision of lyric theory which acknowledges Smith as a foundational figure.