Contemporary imaginative transformations - re-visiting a romantic and victorian poetics/aesthetics of myth and dream

Abstract

The Romantic movement (1790-1830), and Romanticism in its wider sense (considering its revival in the 1880s and 90s), had profound implications not only for the study but also for the artistic representation of myth and dream in Western culture. While dreams and the experience of dreaming (including the ones induced by drugs) are an intrinsic part of Romantic poetics and aesthetics, because they open up new avenues for the exploration of the Self and provide imaginative transformations, myths (whether derived from classical antiquity, medieval legend or contemporary folktales) were regarded by poets like Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats as vital and powerful repositories of human experience and creation. If a literary-poetic interest in insanity and dream processes was mainly the result of the Victorian engagement with the scientific study of the human mind, myth was also a prominent feature of their obsessive concern with time and temporality (past, present and future). Although the Romantic legacy of both dreamy heroes or hero-worship (visible in the revival of Arthurian legend) and Gothic nightmare and monstrosity still looms large in the Early-Victorian period, as the works of Tennyson and the Brontës respectively attest, the mid-Victorians are essentially preoccupied with biblical accounts of revelation (through dream), with the moralistic interpretation of certain myths, and with myths of cultural and scientific progress or evolution (Morris and Blind). Hellenistic subject matter will be present not just in Arnold’s myth of the ‘modern self’, but will persist until the fin-de-siècle, in the work of aesthete and decadent writers as Wilde and Swinburne, but with an emphasis on more transgressive and homoerotic representations of myth, and a pervasive symbology of death and transformation (Thomson and Levy). Moreover, with expanded exploration, through travel and scholarship, this gradually widened to include mythologies belonging to other cultures.