Project
«His Majesty the Baby». Unchained Sovereigns in Western Literature between 19th and 20th Century «His Majesty the Baby». Ontketende vorsten in de Westerse literatuur tussen de 19e en 20e eeuw
In my PhD dissertation I will examine the topos of the unchained sovereign, which had appeared in literature only after the French revolution and the rise of modern democracies. By “unchained sovereigns”, I mean all those fictional characters that exert their sovereign powers in arbitrary and bizarre ways, offering the readers a distorting looking-glass that offers not just a comic but also critical vantage point to observe the dynamics of power. For my research, I’ll consider some texts chosen from the most important Western literatures of the past two centuries. I will conduct an in-depth comparative analysis of the character of the unchained sovereigns in a corpus of approximately fifteen literary texts, combining a thematic approach with Francesco Orlando’s psychoanalytic model of literary analysis. The combination of these two models will allow me to examine the different forms of regression associated with the character of the unchained sovereign, ranging from omnipotence delirium over narcissism to sadism and a prelogic absurdist worldview.