Boyd Petersen

Myths of Male Mothers: Allegorical Renderings of the Birth Topos in Nineteenth-century Poetic Production Boyd Petersen

The focus of Myths of Male Mothers is on nineteenth-century creation narratives, texts from the 1800s that depict the creation of an artificial being. In particular, Petersen focuses on E. T. A. Hoffmann's Der Sandmann, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's L'Eve future. He considers each of these texts as an allegorical rendering of the birth topos in which poetic production is metaphorically compared to childbirth. Each text portrays the creator as male and the creation as a work of technological art. Petersen situates these texts within a context of early Romantic philosophy and demonstrates how they reveal a critique of the very nature of the production of art in an increasingly technological age. In particular, Petersen examines how these texts employ a poetics of confusion, reflect changes in print culture and discourse networks, critique the Romantic philosophical ideal of autoengenderment, participate in the Romantic theory of the fragment, and simultaneously reject the Romantic rhetoric of the technological sublime, while they reaffirm the boundaries established by philosophical discourse on the sublime.