Date of Award

2018

Document Type

Dissertation/Thesis

Submission Date

October 2026

Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]

Corr, Rachel

Abstract

“Mesmeric literature” includes a subset of British Romantic poetry that contains elements of engagement, detachment, and a precarious suspension of reality. Essentially, the mesmeric is a facet of a broader field on altered states of consciousness, which comprises a removal of the self from the body and a division between spiritual and material matters. This thesis will focus on how the “mesmeric,” or “altered states of consciousness,” manifests cross-culturally in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century British Romantic poetry, shamanic healing practices in Amazonian Ecuador, and San healing trance dances in the Kalahari Desert. Through an anthropological and literary lens, this thesis examines anxieties regarding the self and the body as they manifest in poetry, speech, and dance, and how three temporally and spatially distant cultures could give rise to strikingly similar responses to individual identity.

Comments

Includes bibliography.

Extent

51 p.

Identifier

FAUHT00052

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