Journal Article Analysis, Assignment 1-3

Julia Kuehn in her article “Marie Corelli’s Feminine Sublime and the Aesthetic of the Dream”, in a popular context re-evaluate the work of Marie Corelli (1855-1924), the first English bestselling author of the one-volume novel. This article is concerned with what can be called the aesthetic dimension of Corelli’s work. More precisely, the aim is to formulate a rhetoric that describes the narrative strategies of Corelli’s texts. Until now critics have discussed Corelli in a socio-historical context, but have dismissed her novels as popular fiction not worthy of critical analysis (Kuehn, 2008). Consequently, sustained readings of her works are still rare. In fact, in recent years only two critics, namely Rita Felski and Annette Federico, have favored Corelli’s work with close textual analysis (Kuehn, 2008). They explore the author’s appeal through aspects of narrative and not through, for example, the changes in the publishing and library systems.
In contrast, Kuehn (2008) reassesses a representative selection of Corelli’s fictional works, her theoretical and critical writings and her correspondence. Overall, the study aims at understanding the aesthetic of the popular by reading along the lines of three themes. Analyzing a selection of Corelli’s works in the contexts of poetics, romance and religion, it tests out different theoretical models for understanding popular literature. These include genre theory, theories of the sublime, Frankfurt School theories of the mass market, gender theory, Freudian dream theory and selected contemporary psychoanalytical models (Kuehn, 2008). The author develops out of Rita Felski’s analysis of Corelli as a writer of the popular sublime, and subsequently draws upon a variety of other critical readings of the popular and the sublime. Popular culture is, as Felski argues in her essay “God, Love and the Orient,” characterized by an exploration of borders in a utopian gesturing toward a transcendent, exalted, and ineffable sphere beyond the constraints of a mundane material reality, and the location of meaning elsewhere (Kuehn, 2008). Corelli’s contemporary reviewers addressed her attempt to conquer an ordinary reality through “romances” and “dreams” (Kuehn, 2008). The author states that Felski considers this longing as an instance of the sublime, which she redefine in general terms as the aspiration of the human mind toward the silliness which invoke a sense of rapture, transport, or self-transcendence that is linked to a perception of the ineffable and other-worldly.
The introduction argues that Corelli instinctively develops a feminine sublime as a subset of the popular sublime in her novels. It can be understood as a diverse reading of experience characterized by the wish to merge with the sublime object of rapture rather than dominate it by reason. The feminine sublime creates a non-rational rhetoric, which signals the subject’s failure to communicate experience through reason. It finds expression in the romance genre, which is characterized by a yearning for the metaphysical and a mode of excess. Three individual chapters interpret the three main signifiers of Corelli’s feminine sublime: Aesthetics, Love and Religion, and analyze how Corelli manipulates these transcendental themes for a populist context. A subsidiary theme of this article is the proto-modernist elements of Corelli’s work. Throughout the argument surprising convergences between Corelli’s turn-of-the-century populism and the modernist movement emerge.

Reference
Kuehn, J. (2008). The Strategies of the Popular Novel: Marie Corelli’s Feminine Sublime and the Aesthetic of the Dream. The Journal of Popular Culture Volume 41, issue 6, p. 975- 993. Retrieved June 9, 2009 from www.journal.ohiolink.edu