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Thesis
SAILING ON THE CLOUD OF SCIENCE
University of West Florida
Master of Arts (MA), University of West Florida
2018
Abstract
Ann Yearsley's first collection Poems on Several Occasions complicates the separation of science and sensibility - of masculine and feminine modes of inquiry - in her poetry by presenting her female patrons as scientific explorers, researchers, and discoverers. Yearsley's first set of poems in the volume appreciate the Enlightenment ethos of her patrons and teach the laboring-class poet to acquire scientific knowledge through examples of sensibility. Yearsley's poems foreground sincere sensibility from its artificial, insincere "other." While the volume praises these examples of sincere sensibility, the collection moves from implicit class divisions between patrons and the patronized poet to operational divisions between social groups that bar the poor from access to Romantic medicine in the collection's final poem "Clifton Hill". Yearsley's interrogation of dominant science through the discourse of sensibility anticipates what will become her friend Thomas Beddoes's scientific project in Bristol in the 1790s. Read together rather than as separate texts written for different occasions, Yearsley's collection constructs a coherent method of women's scientific inquiry from her position as a marginalized figure in scientific discourse.
Details
- Title
- SAILING ON THE CLOUD OF SCIENCE
- Resource Type
- Thesis
- Publisher
- University of West Florida
- Format
- text
- Identifiers
- 99380090838106600
- Academic Unit
- English
- Language
- English
- Awarding Institution
- University of West Florida; Master of Arts (MA)
- Theses and Dissertations
- Master of Arts (MA), University of West Florida